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RACE QUESTIONS, PROVINCIALISM 
AND OTHER AMERICAN PROBLEMS 



•The 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd, 

TORONTO 



RACE QUESTIONS 
PROVINCIALISM 

AND OTHER AMERICAN PROBLEMS 



BY 



JOSIAH ROYCE 

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



"Ntta garfe 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1908 

All rif/hts reserved 



LIBRARY ct CONGRESS 
Tv/o Copies Received 

OCT 27 1908 

CopyriElU tntry 
CLASS Cu XXn. fi-. 



Copyright, 1908, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908. 



Norfaoob i^waa 

J. 8. Cashing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

The five essays which make up the present 
volume were all, at some time, read, before 
various audiences, as addresses. Each one 
contains indications of the special occasion 
for the sake of which it was first prepared. 
Yet each one of them also states opinions 
which, from my own point of view, make it a 
part of an effort to apply, to some of our 
American problems, that general doctrine 
about life which I have recently summed up 
in my book entitled " The Philosophy of 
Loyalty." In the light of that philosophy I 
therefore hope that the various special opin- 
ions here expressed may be judged. This 
book I regard as an auxiliary to its more sys- 
tematic predecessor. 

The closing essay of the present volume 
contains, in fact, a summary of the theses 
upon which my " Philosophy of Loyalty " is 



PREFACE 

based, as well as a direct application of these 
theses to a special practical problem of our 
recent education. 

The first essay here printed — that on 
" Race Questions " — was read before the Chi- 
cago Ethical Society, in 1905. It was later 
published in the " International Journal of 
Ethics." It is an effort to express and to 
justify, in the special case of the race-prob- 
lems, the spirit which I have elsewhere defined 
as that of " Loyalty to Loyalty.'* 

The second and fourth essays of this book 
both relate to '' Provincialism," — the one 
discussing, in general terms, the need and 
uses of that spirit in our American life ; the 
other sketching, as well as I am able, the 
bases upon which rests that particular form 
of provincialism to which I, as a native Cali- 
fornian, personally owe most. The paper on 
"The Pacific Coast " was prepared as early as 
1898. The general essay on " Provincialism " 
was read as a Phi Beta Kappa Address, at 
the Iowa State University, in 1902. In the 
"Philosophy of Loyalty" the importance of 

vi 



PREFACE 

an enlightened provincialism is discussed in 
the course of the fifth lecture of that volume, 
— a lecture whose general topic is: "Certain 
American Problems in their Relation to Loy- 
alty." What I there merely sketched regard- 
ing provincialism is here more fully set forth. 
In my own mind, meanwhile, the essay on the 
" Pacific Coast " is a continuation of the 
study which first took form in my volume on 
the history of California, published, in the 
Commonwealth Series, in 1886. In that work 
I stated, in various passages, views about the 
provincial aspects of loyalty, — views which 
have later come to form part of the more gen- 
eral ethical doctrine to which I am now 
committed. 

Loyalty is the practical aspect and expres- 
sion of an idealistic philosophy. Such a phi- 
losophy, in relation to theoretical as well as to 
practical problems, I have long tried to main- 
tain and to teach. A familiar charge against 
idealism, however, is, that it is an essentially 
unpractical doctrine. Such a charge can be 
fairly answered only in case an idealist is 

vii 



PREFACE 

quite willing, not only to listen with good 
humor to his common-sense critics, but also 
to criticise himself and to observe the defects 
of his tendencies. In such a spirit I have 
tried to write the third of the essays here 
printed. I should be glad to have this paper 
read in the light of the lecture on " Con- 
science," in the " Philosophy of Loyalty." 

Some passages in these papers show special 
signs of the dates when they were written; 
and therefore the reader may notice a few 
allusions and illustrations — due to passing 
events — which would be otherwise chosen or 
stated were the papers composed to-day. 
Thus, my sketch of conditions in Jamaica, 
in the essay on " Race Questions," contains a 
few s atistical and other data that were pub- 
licly reported in 1904, and that would need 
some modification to adapt them to the pres- 
ent moment. But I believe that none of 
these matters interfere with what my volume 
attempts to be, — a series of illustrations, pre- 
pared in the course of a number of years, but 
all bearing upon the application of a certain 

viii 



PREFACE 

philosophical doctrine and spirit to some 
problems of American life. 

I have mentioned the Japanese, more than 
once, in these pages. It is fair to say that 
the characterization of their national spirit 
which occurs in the essay on " Provincialism " 
was written in 1902, and here appears sub- 
stantially unchanged. 

Mrs. Royce has constantly aided me in pre- 
paring these essays for publication; and to 
her help many things in this volume are due. 

JOSIAH ROYCE. 

Cambridge, Mass^ 
October 16, 1908. 



CONTENTS 

I. RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES . 

Importance of the problem, 1-4. — Summary 
statement of various questions about races, 5, 6. — 
The defects of our present scientific knowledge 
regarding racial psychology, G-10. — The lesson 
taught by Japan, 10-14. — The lesson taught by 
Jamaica, I.")-'?!. — The meaning of race in the 
history of civilization : sceptical survey of the state 
of our knowledge, 31-47. — The psychology of 
racial antipathies, 47-j^. — Conclusion, 53. 

II. PROMXCIALISM 

Definition of Provincialism, 55-61. — In praise 
of provincialism, 61-67. — The evils in American 
life which provincialism must correct; first, the 
evils due to the newness of the country, 67-73. — 
The evils due to the levelling tendency of recent 
civilization, 79. — The evils due to the mob-spirit, 
80-86. — The right type of social group defined, 
87—91. — The problem of dealing with the mob- 
spirit, 91-96. — The service that provincialism may 
accomplish in dealing with the foregoing types of 
evils, 96-98. — How to cultivate provinciahsm with- 
out merely lapsing into narrowness, 98-108. — The 
province as an ideal rather than as a boast, 100- 
102. — Provincialism, docility, and individualism: 
illustration in the case of Japan, 10-2-105. — The 
cultivation of the youth of a province, 105. — Pro- 
vincialism and art, 107. 

xi 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

III. ON CERTAIN LIMITATIONS^ OF THE 

THOUGHTFUL PUBLIC IN AMERICA 109 

American idealism, in its popular and practical 
aspects, its power and prevalence, ll'2-l!25; its 
excesses, 119-1'21; its good aspects seen in the 
modern academic movement, 1'2'2-1'25. — Ineffec- 
tiveness of too large a portion of our ideal istically 
disposed public, l'2o-131 ; illustration from our 
early provincial history in the newer parts of the 
country, 131-135 ; and from older communities, 
135, 136. — The cure for tliis ineffectiveness, 136— 
165. — Difficulty and importance of this cure, 136— 
139. — The tendency to abstractions, 140—143. — 
The limitations of the effectiveness of the human 
thinking- process, 144-148. — Not alone philoso- 
phers abuse the reasoning powers, 149-15-2. — In- 
stinct and reason, their respective practical offices, 
152-158. — Resulting advice, 158-160. — On the 
love of the " new " in thought, 160-164. — Practi- 
cal conclusions, 165. 

IV. THE PACIFIC COAST. A PSYCHOLOGI- 

CAL STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF 
CLIMATE AND CIVILIZATION . .167 
The journey to California, and its goal, as an 
introduction to the study. 169-173. — General 
review of the physical conditions and climate of 
the Pacific coast, 174-187. — The early society of 
Cahfornia, 187-190. — The relations of chmate 
and mental life as characterized by the poetical 
writers of California, 190-199. — General consid- 
eration of physical, social, and individual condi- 
tions as determining the CaUfornian mind; result- 



CONTEXTS 

PAGE 

ing individualism; accompanying loyalty; the 
tension between the two tendencies, 199-'210. — 
Historical illustrations. '■210-'2'20. — Peculiar forms 
of individualism in California, '217-'2^24. — Re- 
sulting idealism, Hi. 

SOME RELATIONS OF Pin^SICAL TRAIN- 
ING TO THE PRESENT PROBLEMS 
OF MORAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA . 227 

The general relations of physical and moral 
education, -HO-iS'^. — General definition of Loyalty, 
282-'-24'>. — " Loyalty to Loyalty" defined and 
illustrated, -2i'2-'i5'i. — The first way in which 
physical training can be of service to loyalty, 
namely as a preparation of the organism for devo- 
tion to causes, 254-259. — The second service of 
physical training to the cause of loyalty: team- 
loyalty, and similar tendencies, ':2GO-'265. The 
third service of physical training: fair play and 
the spirit of universal loyalty, "265--27L — \Sniat 
kinds of sports and contests best further loyalty, 
criterion stated, 271-276. — Philip Stanley Abbot's 
account of the mountain climber's *' fulness of 
life," 277-'-280; contrast with certain other types 
of athletic experience, 280-284. — Results as to the 
values of athletic sports and exercises for moral 
training, 285-287. 



ZIU 



I 

RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

r I IHE numerous questions and prejudices 
-^ wliich are aroused by the contact of 
the various races of men have always been 
important factors in human history. They 
promise, however, to become, in the near 
future, still more important than they have 
ever been before. Such increased importance 
of race questions and prejudices, if it comes 
to pass, will be due not to any change in 
human nature, and especially not to any 
increase in the diversity or in the contrasting 
traits of the races of men themselves, but 
simply to the greater extent and complexity 
of the work of civilization. Physically speak- 
ing, great masses of men are to-day brought 
into more frequent and closer contact than 
was formerly possible, because of the ease 
with which at present the numerous means 
of communication can be used, because of 
the increase of peaceful migrations, and 

3 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

because of the imperial ambitions of several 
of the world's great peoples. Hence what- 
ever contact, conflict, or mutual influence 
the races of men have had in the past, we find 
to-day more ways and places in which men 
find themselves in the presence of alien races, 
with whom they have to learn to live in the 
same social order. When we think of East 
Indian coolies now present as laborers, side 
by side with the native negroes, and with 
white men, in the British West Indies; when 
we remember the problem of South Africa, 
as it was impressed upon our minds a few 
years since, at a moment when Dutchmen 
and Englishmen fought for the land, while 
Kafiirs and Zulus watched the conflict ; when 
we recall what the recent war between Japan 
and Russia has already meant for the future 
of the races of men in the far East ; and when, 
with a few only of such typical instances in 
mind, we turn back to our own country, and 
think how many difi^erent race-problems con- 
front us, — we then see that the earliest social 
problem of humanity is also the most recent 

4 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

problem. This is the problem of dealing 
with the men who seem to us somehow very 
widely di lie rent from ourselves, in physical 
constitution, in temperament, in all their 
deeper nature, so that we are tempted to think 
of them as natural strangers to our souls, 
while nevertheless we find that they are 
stubbornly there in our world, and that they 
are men as much determined to live as we 
are, and are men who, in turn, find us as 
incomprehensible as we find them. Of these 
diverse races, what ones are the superior and 
what ones are the inferior races ? What 
race or races ought to rule ? What ones ought 
to yield to their natural masters ? To which 
one of these races has God, or nature, or 
destiny, ordained the rightful and final sover- 
eignty of the earth ? Which of these types 
of men is really the human type.^ Are they 
by their presence and their rivalry essentially 
perilous to one another's interests ? And 
if so, what one amongst them is there whose 
spread, or whose increase in power or in 
number, is most perilous to the true cause 

5 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

of civilization? Is it a "yellow peril," or 
a "black peril," or perhaps, after all, is it 
not rather some form of "white peril," which 
most threatens the future of humanity in 
this day of great struggles and of complex 
issues ? Are all men equal, as the Eighteenth 
Century theorists insisted? Or if the actual 
inequality of men in power, in value, in pro- 
gressiveness, is an obvious fact, then how is 
this fact related to racial distinctions ? 

Such are a few of the questions that crowd 
upon us when we think about the races of 
men, and about their various relations to 
civilization. I do not mean, in this brief 
discussion, to exhaust any of these questions, 
but I want to call attention to a few principles 
which seem to me to be serviceable to any 
one who wants to look at race questions 
fairly and humanely. 

I 

It will be natural for some of my readers 
to interpose, at this point, the suggestion that 
the principal guidance in any attempt to 
answer such questions as the foregoing must 

6 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

come from an appeal to the results of the 
modern scientific study of the races of men. 
Why speculate and moralize, one may say ? 
Have not the races of men been studied in 
recent times with elaborate care? What can 
tell us how to deal with the race-problems, 
in case we neglect the results of anthropology 
and of ethnology ? And if we consult those 
sciences, do they not already give us a basis 
for decision regarding all such matters — a 
basis which is far more valuable than any 
( chance observations of an amateur can be? 
As a fact, if I supposed that, in their pres- 
1 ent stage of progress, the sciences which 
I deal with man had already attained to exact 
results regarding the mental and moral dif- 
ferences, prospects, and destinies, of the differ- 
ent stocks of the genus homo, nobody would 
be humbler than I should be in accepting, 
and in trying to use the verdict that would 
then have been obtained. But I confess 
that, as a student of ethics and of certain other 
aspects of our common human nature, I have 
been a good deal baflled in trying to discover 

7 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

just what the results of science are regarding 
the true psychological and moral meaning of 
race-differences. I shall later speak further 
of some of the difficulties of this scientific 
aspect of our topic. It is enough to say here 
that when I consult any of the known Ras- 
sentheoretiker for light, I do indeed learn 
that the concept of race is the key to the com- 
prehension of all history, and that, if you only 
form a clear idea of the important types of 
men (types such, for instance, as the mar- 
vellous Germanen of Chamberlain's Grund- 
ziXge des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts), you can 
then determine with exactness precisely who 
ought to rule and who ought to yield, and 
can predict the forms of civilization, the 
Weltanschauung en, and the other possessions, 
which will be characteristic of each type 
of men, so long as that type shall en- 
dure. When I observe, however, that the 
Rassentheoretiker frequently uses his science 
to support most of his personal prejudices, 
and is praised by his sympathizers almost 
equally for his exact knowledge and for his 

8 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

vigorous display of temperament, I begin to 
wonder whether a science which mainly de- 
votes itself to proving that we ourselves are 
the salt of the earth, is after all so exact as it 
aims to be. It is with some modern race- 
theories, as it is with some forms of inter- 
national yacht racing. I know nothing about 
yachting; but whenever any form of the ex- 
alted sport of international yachting proves to 
be definable as a sort of contest in which the 
foreigner is invariably beaten, I for my part 
take no interest in learning more about the 
rules of that particular game. And pre- 
cisely so, when men marshal all the resources 
of their science to prove that their own race- 
prejudices are infallible, I can feel no con- 
fidence in what they imagine to be the result 
of science. Much of our modern race-theory 
reminds me, in its spirit, altogether too much 
of some of the conversations in the "Jungle 
Book," — or of the type of international 
courtesy expressed in "The Truce of the 
Bear," — too much, I say to seem like exact 
science. Mowgli's remarks addressed to Red 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

Dog may have been good natural history; 
but scientific Zoology does not proceed in 
that way. 

While I deeply respect, then, the actual 
work of the sciences which deal with man, 
and while I fully recognize their modern 
progress, I greatly doubt that these sciences 
as yet furnish us with the exact results which 
representative race-theorists sometimes insist 
upon. Hence I am unable to begin this little 
study by a mere report of what science has 
established regarding the mental and moral 
varieties of men. I must rather make my 
beginning with a mention of two instances 
which have recently been much in my mind, 
and which bear upon the meaning of race 
prejudices. One of these instances is to-day 
in everybody's mind. 

II 

I refer then, first, to the wonderful lesson 
that Japan has been teaching us regarding 
what human energy and devotion have done 
and can do, and can do also in case of a race 
that is indeed remote enough from our own. 

10 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

I remember well the Japan of the geography 
text-books of my childhood, text-books which 
were even then antiquated enough; but I 
believed them. Japan was a weird land, 
according to the old text-books, — a land 
from which foreigners were excluded, a land 
where all things were as perverse as possible, 
where criminals were boiled in oil, where 
Catholic missionaries had long ago been 
martyred. Whatever the Japanese were, they 
were plainly men of the wrong race. Later, 
however, I learned something of the contem- 
porary history of Japan as it then was. The 
scene was now, indeed, vastly changed. The 
Japanese had opened their land; and here- 
upon, lo ! in a magic way, they were imitating, 
so we heard, all of our European customs. 
So we next had to alter our own opinion as to 
their essential nature. They became in our 
eyes a plastic race of wonderful little children, 
small of stature, quick of wit, light-minded — 
a folk who took up any suggestion precisely 
as the playful cliildren often do. They, too, 
were playing, it seemed, with our whole 

11 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

Western civilization. Plainly, then, they were 
a race who had no serious life of their own at 
all. Those of us who disliked them noted 
that they thus showed an ape-like unsteadi- 
ness of conduct. This, then, was their 
racial characteristic. Those who admired 
them thought of them as a new sort of pets, 
to be humored and instructed with all our 
superior condescension. Well, as time went 
on, and I grew to manhood, I myself came to 
know some of these Japanese as students. 
Hereupon, however, I gradually learned to see 
such men in a wholly new light. I found 
them, with all their steadfast courtesy, pleas- 
antly, but impenetrably reserved — keepers 
of their own counsel, men whose life had, as 
I soon found, a vast background of opinions 
and customs that I could not fathom. When, 
I said, shall I ever see what is behind that 
Japanese smile ? What is in their hearts ? 
With an immovable self-consciousness they 
resisted every effort to alter, from without, any 
of their essential ideals. Politely, whenever 
you pressed them, they declined to admit 

12 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

that any of our Western arts or opinions were 
equal in value to their own most cherished 
national ideal treasures. And this they did 
even at the moment when they were present, 
most respectfully, as learners. They learned 
well ; but plainly they meant to use this learn- 
ing for their own purposes. An enthusiastic 
lady in an American University town was once 
seeking to draw from a Japanese visitor some 
admission of the importance of Christianity 
for the higher civilization of his country. 
"Confess," she insisted, "confess what a boon 
our missionaries have brought you in intro- 
'i ducing Christianity into your land." "You 
are right," answered the Japanese, with his 
usual courteous smile, "you are right; the 
missionaries in introducing Christianity, have 
indeed brought us a great good. They have 
completed the variety of religions in Japan." 
This impenetrable Japanese self-conscious- 
ness, this unconquerable polite and obstinate 
reserve, what did it mean ? Well, Mr. Hearn 
and his kin have now let us know in a literary 
way something of the true heart of Japan. 

13 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

And the recent war has shown us what Japan 
meant by imitating our Western ways, and 
also what ancestral ideals have led her sons 
to death in battle, and still hold the nation so 
closely knit to their Emperor. Already I 
have heard some tender souls amongst us 
say: "It is they who are racially our supe- 
riors." Some of us may live to see Japanese 
customs pervading our land, and all of our 
professional imitators trying to be Japanese. 
Well, I myself am no worshipper of any 
new fancy or distant civilization, merely 
because of its temporary prominence. But 
the true lesson which Japan teaches us to- 
day is, that it is somewhat hard to find out by 
looking at the featiu-es of a man's face, or at 
the color of his skin, or even at the reports of 
travellers who visit his land, what it is of 
which his race is really capable. Perhaps 
the Japanese are not of the right race: but 
we now admit that so long as we judged them 
merely by their race, and by mere appearances, 
we were judging them ignorantly, and falsely. 
This. I sav, has been to me a most interestinoj 

14 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

lesson in the fallibility of some of our race 
judgments. 

m 

So much, then, for one lesson of experience. 
I have recently been much impressed by an- 
other lesson, but by one of a very different 
character, occurring, so to speak, at the other 
e3:t remit y of the worid of modem race-prob- 
lems. The negro has so far shown none of 
the great powers of the Japanese. Let us, 
then, provisionally admit at this stage of our 
discussion that the negro is in his present 
backward state as a race, for reasons which 
are not due merely to circumstances, but 
which are quite innate in his mental constitu- 
tion. I shaU indeed return to that topic 
later on. But, for the moment, let that view 
pass as if it were finally accepted. View the 
negro, then, for the instant merely as a back- 
ward race. But let the race-question here be 
our own pressing Southern question : How can 
the white man and the negro, once forced, 
as they are in our South, to live side by side, 
best learn to live with a minimum of friction, 

15 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

with a maximum of cooperation ? I have long 
learned from my Southern friends that this 
end can only be attained by a firm and by a 
very constant and explicit insistence upon 
keeping the negro in his proper place, as a 
social inferior — who, then, as an inferior, 
should, of course, be treated humanely, but 
who must first be clearly and unmistakably 
taught where he belongs. I have observed 
that the pedagogical methods which my 
Southern friends of late years have found 
it their duty to use, to this end, are methods 
such as still keep awake a good deal of 
very lively and intense irritation in the 
minds not only of the pupils but also of 
the teachers. Now irritation, viewed merely 
in itself, is not an enlightening state of 
mind. It is, therefore, according to our 
modern views, not a very pedagogical state of 
mind. I am myself, for instance, a fairly 
irritable person, and I am also a teacher. 
But at the moments when I am irritated 
I am certainly not just then a good teacher. 
Is, however, the irritation which seems to be 

16 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

the accompaniment of some of the recent 
Southern methods of teaching the negro his 
place an inevitable evil, a wholly necessary 
accompaniment of the present transition period 
in the South ? Must such increase of race- 
hatred first come, in order that later, when- 
ever the negro has fully learned his lesson, 
and aspires no more beyond his station, peace 
may come? Well, concerning just this mat- 
ter I lately learned what was to me, in 
my inexperience, a new lesson. I have had 
occasion three times, in recent summers, 
to visit British West Indies, Jamaica, and 
Trinidad, at a time when few tourists were 
there. Upon visiting Jamaica I first went 
round the coast of the island, visiting its 
various ports. I then went inland, and walked 
for miles over its admirable country roads. 
I discussed its condition with men of various 
occupations. I read some of its official litera- 
ture. I then consulted with a new interest its 
history, I watched its negroes in various 
places, and talked with some of them, too. 
I have since collected such further informa- 
c 17 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

tion as I had time to collect regarding its life, 
as various authorities have discussed the topic, 
and this is the result : — 

Jamaica has a population of surely not more 
than 14,000 or 15,000 whites, mostly English. 
Its black population considerably exceeds 
600,000. Its mulatto population, of various 
shades, numbers, at the very least, some 
40,000 or 50,000. Its plantation life, in the 
days before emancipation, was much sad- 
der and severer, by common account, than 
ours in the South ever was. Both the period 
of emancipation and the immediately fol- 
lowing period were of a very discouraging 
type. In the sixties of the last century there 
was one very unfortunate insurrection. The 
economic history of the island has also been 
in many ways unlucky even to the present day. 
Here, then, are certainly conditions which 
in some respects are decidedly such as would 
seem to tend toward a lasting state of general 
irritation, such as you might suppose would 
make race-questions acute. Moreover, the 
population, being a tropical one, has serious 

18 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

moral burdens to contend with of the sort that 
result from the known influences of such 
climates upon human character in the men 
of all races. 

And yet, despite all these disadvantages, 
to-day, whatever the problems of Jamaica, 
whatever its defects, our own present Southern 
race-problem in the forms which we know best, 
simply does not exist. There is no public con- 
troversy about social race equality or supe- 
riority. Neither a white man nor a white 
woman feels insecure in moving about freely 
amongst the black population anywhere on 
the island. The colony has a Legislative 
Assembly, although one of extremely limited 
legislative powers. For the choice to this 
assembly a suffrage determined only by a 
decidedly low rate-qualification is free to all 
who have sufficient property, but is used by 
only a very small portion of the negro popula- 
tion. The negro is, on the whole, neither 
painfully obstrusive in his public manners, 
nor in need of being sharply kept in his place. 
Within the circles of the black population itself 

19 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

there is meanwhile a decidedly rich social dif- 
ferentiation. There are negroes in government 
service, negroes in the professions, negroes 
who are fairly prosperous peasant proprietors, 
and there are also the poor peasants ; there are 
the thriftless, the poor in the towTis, — yes, 
as in any tropical country, the beggars. In 
Kingston and in some other towns there is a 
small class of negroes who are distinctly crim- 
inal. On the whole, however, the negroes 
and colored population, taken in the mass, are 
orderly, law-abiding, contented, still back- 
ward in their education, but apparently 
advancing. They are generally loyal to the 
government. The best of them are aspir- 
ing, in their own way, and wholesomely 
self-conscious. Yet there is no doubt what- 
ever that English white men are the essential 
controllers of the destiny of the country. 
But these English whites, few as they are, 
control the country at present, with extraor- 
dinarily little friction, and wholly without 
those painful emotions, those insistent com- 
plaints and anxieties, which at present are 

20 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

so prominent in the minds of many of our 
own Southern brethren. Life in Jamaica is 
not ideal. The economical aspect of the 
island is in many ways unsatisfactory. But 
the negro race-question, in our present Ameri- 
can sense of that term, seems to be substan- 
tially solved. 

How ? By race-mixture ? 

The considerable extent to which race- 
mixture went in the earlier history of Jamaica 
is generally known. Here, as elsewhere, how- 
ever, it has been rather the social inequality 
of the races, than any approach to equality, 
which has been responsible for the mixture, in 
so far as such has occurred. It was the social 
inequality of the plantation days that began 
the process of mixture. If the often-mentioned 
desire to raise the "color" of their children, 
has later led the colored population to seek 
a further amalgamation of the two stocks, 
certainly that tendency, so far as it is effective, 
has been due to the social advantages of the 
lighter color — and not due to any motive 
which has decreased the ancient disadvan- 

21 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

tages under which the darker race has had to 
suffer. If race-amalgamation is indeed to be 
viewed as always an evil, the best way to 
counteract the growth of that evil must every- 
where be the cultivation of racial self-respect 
and not of racial degradation. As a fact, 
it is not the amalgamation of the stocks, 
so far as that has occurred, which has tended 
to reduce the friction between the races in 
Jamaica. As to the English newcomers to 
the island, they probably do not tend to 
become amalgamated with the colored stocks 
in Jamaica, more than in any other region 
where the English live. The English stock 
tends, here as elsewhere, to be proud of itself, 
and to keep to itself. How then has the 
solution of what was once indeed a grave 
race-question been brought about in Jamaica ? 
I answer, by the simplest means in the world 
— the simplest, that is, for Englishmen — 
viz. : by English administration, and by 
English reticence. When once the sad period 
of emancipation and of subsequent occasional 
disorder was passed, the Englishman did in 

22 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

Jamaica what he has so often and so well 
done elsewhere. He organized his colony; 
he established good local courts, which gained 
by square treatment the confidence of the 
blacks. The judges of such courts were 
Englishmen. The English ruler also pro- 
vided a good country constabulary, in which 
native blacks also found service, and in which 
they could exercise authority over other blacks. 
Black men, in other words, were trained, under 
English management, of course, to police 
black men. A sound civil service was also 
organized; and in that educated negroes 
found in due time their place, while the chiefs 
of each branch of the service were and are, 
in the main. Englishmen. The excise and the 
health services, both of which are very highly 
developed, have brought the law near to the 
life of the humblest negro, in ways which 
he sometimes finds, of course, restraining, 
Ijut which he also frequently finds beneficent. 
Hence he is accustomed to the law; he sees 
its ministers often, and often, too, as men of 
his own race; and in the main, he is fond of 

23 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

order, and learns to be respectful toward the 
established ways of society. The Jamaica 
negro is described by those who know him as 
especially fond of bringing his petty quarrels 
and personal grievances into court. He is 
litigious just as he is vivacious. But this 
confidence in the law is just what the courts 
have encouraged. That is one way, in fact, to 
deal with the too forward and strident negro. 
Encourage him to air his grievances in court, 
listen to him patiently, and fine him when 
he deserves fines. That is a truly English 
type of social pedagogy. It works in the 
direction of making the negro a conscious 
helper toward good social order. 

Administration, I say, has done the larger 
half of the work of solving Jamaica's race- 
problem. Administration has filled the island 
with good roads, has reduced to a minimum 
the tropical diseases by means of an excellent 
health-service, has taught the population 
loyalty and order, has led them some steps 
already on the long road "up from slavery," 
has given them, in many cases, the true self- 

24 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

respect of those who themselves officially co- 
operate in the work of the law, and it has done 
this without any such result as our Southern 
friends nowadays conceive when they think 
of what is called ** negro domination." Ad- 
ministration has allayed ancient irritations. 
It has gone far to offset the serious economic 
and tropical troubles from which Jamaica 
meanwhile suffers. 

Yes, the work has been done by administra- 
tion, — and by reticence. For the English- 
man, in his official and governmental dealings 
with backward peoples, has a great way of 
being s'uperior without very often publicly 
saying that he is superior. You well know 
that in dealing, as an individual, with other 
individuals, trouble is seldom made by the 
fact that you are actually the superior of 
another man in any respect. The trouble 
comes when you tell the other man, too 
stridently, that you are his superior. Be my 
superior, quietly, simply showing your supe- 
riority in your deeds, and very likely I shall 
love you for the very fact of your superiority. 

25 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

For we all love our leaders. But tell me that 
I am your inferior, and then perhaps I may 
grow boyish, and may throw stones. Well, 
it is so with races. Grant then that yours is 
the superior race. Then you can afford 
to say little about that subject in your public 
dealings with the backward race. Supe- 
riority is best shown by good deeds and by 
few boasts. 

IV 
So much for the lesson that Jamaica has 
suggested to me. The widely different con- 
ditions of Trinidad suggest, despite the differ- 
ences, a somewhat similar lesson. Here also 
there are great defects in the social order; 
but again, our Southern race-problem does 
not exist. When, with such lessons in mind, 
I recall our problem, as I hear it from my 
brethren of certain regions of our Union, I 
see how easily we can all mistake for a per- 
manent race-problem a difficulty that is es- 
sentially a problem of quite another sort. 
Mr. Thomas Nelson Page in his recent 
book on the "Southerners' Problem" speaks, 

2G 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

in one notable passage, of the possibility which 
he calls Utopian, that perhaps some day the 
negro in the South may be made to cooperate 
in the keeping of order by the organization 
under State control of a police of his own 
race, who shall deal with blacks. He even 
mentions that the English in the East Indies 
use native constabulary. But this possibility 
is not Utopian, When I hear the complaint 
of the Southerner, that the race-problem 
is such as constantly to endanger the safety 
of his home, I now feel disposed to say: "The 
problem that endangers the sanctity of your 
homes and that is said sometimes to make 
lynching a necessity, is not a race-problem. 
It is an administrative problem. You have 
never organized a country constabulary. 
Hence, when various social conditions, amongst 
which the habit of irritating public speech 
about race-questions is indeed one, though 
only one, condition, have tended to the pro- 
ducing and to the arousing of extremely 
dangerous criminals in your communities, 
you have no adequate means of guarding 

27 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

against the danger. When you complain that 
such criminals, when they flee from justice, 
get sympathy from some portion of their 
ignorant fellows and so are aided to get away, 
you forget that you have not first made your 
negro countryman familiar with, and fond of, 
the law, by means of a vigorous and well- 
organized and generally beneficent administra- 
tion constantly before his eyes, not only in the 
pursuit of criminals, but in the whole care of 
public order and health. If you insist that 
in some districts the white population is too 
sparse or too poor, or both, to furnish an 
eflficient country constabulary constantly on 
duty, why, then, have you not long since 
trained black men to police black men.^ 
Sympathy with the law grows with respon- 
sibility for its administration. If it is re- 
volting to you to see black men possessed of 
the authority of a country constabulary, still, 
if you will, you can limit their authority to 
a control over their own race. If you say all 
this speech of mine is professorial, unpractical, 
Utopian, and if you still cry out bitterly for the 

28 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

effective protection of your womankind, I 
reply merely, look at Jamaica. Look at other 
English colonies. 

In any case, the Southern race-problem will 
never be relieved by speech or by practices 
such as increase irritation. It will be relieved 
when administration grows sufficiently effect- 
ive, and when the negroes themselves get an 
increasingly responsible part in this admin- 
istration in so far as it relates to their own 
race. That may seem a wild scheme. But I 
insist : It is the English way. Look at 
Jamaica, and learn how to protect your own 
homes. 

I have reviewed two very different lessons 
which I have recently had brought home to 
me regarding race-problems. What is there 
which is common to these two lessons.^ Is it 
not this : In estimating, in dealing with races, 
in defining what their supposedly unchange- 
able characteristics are, in planning what to 
do with them, we are all prone to confuse the 
accidental with the essential. We are likely 
to take for an essential race-characteristic 

29 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

what is a transient incident, or a product of 
special social conditions. We are disposed to 
view as a fatal and overwhelming race-problem 
what is a perfectly curable accident of our 
present form of administration. If we are 
indeed of a superior race ourselves, we shall, 
however, best prove the fact by learning to 
distinguish the accidental from the essential 
in our relations with other races. I speak 
with no lack of sympathy for the genuine and 
bitter trials of our Southern brethren when I 
say that I suppose the mistake which I now 
point out, the mistake of confusing the es- 
sential and the accidental, is the mistake that 
they are now making in many of their sincerest 
expressions of concern over their race-problem. 
So much for the two lessons that have led 
me to the present discussion. But now let 
me pass to a somewhat wider view of race- 
problems. Let me ask a little more generally. 
What, if anything, can be known to be es- 
sential about the characteristics of a race 
of men and consequently an essentially im- 
portant consideration in our dealings with 

30 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

alien races? Speaking so far as we can, 
apart from prejudice, what can we say about 
what it is which distinguishes the various 
races of men from one another.? 

V 
The term "race" is popularly used in a very 
vague way. The newspapers not long ago 
said, during trouble in Poland, that the Rus- 
sian soldiers then in Warsaw showed "race- 
antipathy" in their conflicts with the people. 
We all know, however, that the mutual hatred 
of Russians and Poles is due mainly to political 
and to religious causes. Frenchmen of the 
northern provinces, who are anthropologically 
wholly indistinguishable, as Professor Ripley 
tells us, from the inhabitants of many western 
German districts, still have what they call a 
" race-antipathy " for the men across the border. 
Thus almost any national or political or 
religious barrier, if it is old enough, may lead 
to a consciousness of difference of race. On 
the other hand, there are, of course, unques- 
tionable physical varieties of mankind, dis- 
tinguished by well-known physical contrasts. 

31 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

But the anthropologists still almost hope- 
lessly disagree as to what the accurate classi- 
fication of these true races may be. Such a 
classification, however, does not concern us 
here. We are now interested in the minds 
of men. We want to know what the races of 
men are socially good for. And not in the 
study of skulls or of hair, or of skin color, 
and not in the survey of all these bewildering 
complications with which physical anthro- 
pology deals, shall we easily find an answer 
to our more practical questions, viz., to our 
questions regarding the way in which these 
various races of men are related to the inter- 
ests of civilization, and regarding the spirit 
in which we ought to estimate and practically 
to deal with these racial traits of mankind. 

For after all, it is a man's mind, rather 
than his skull, or his hair, or his skin, that we 
most need to estimate. And if hereupon we 
ask ourselves just how these physical varieties 
of the human stock, just how these shades of 
color, these types of hair, these forms of skull, 
or these contours of body, are related to the 

32 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

mental powers and to the moral character- 
istics of the men in question, then, if only we 
set prejudice wholly aside, and appeal to 
science to help us, we find ourselves in the 
present state of knowledge almost hopelessly 
at sea. We know too little as yet about the 
natural history of the human mind, our psy- 
chology is far too infantile a science, to give 
us any precise information as to the way in 
which the inherited, the native, the constitu- 
tional aspects of the minds of men really vary 
with their complexions or with their hair. 
Yet that, of course, is just what we most want 
to know. It is easy to show that an Austra- 
lian is just now far below our mental level. 
But how far is his degradation due to the in- 
herited and unchangeable characters of his 
race, and how far to his long struggle wuth 
the dreary desert ? How far is he, as we now 
find him, a degenerate, whose ancestors were 
on some far higher level ? In other words, 
is his type of mind a true variety of the human 
mind, inbred and unchangeable.^ How far 
is it, so to speak, a mere incident.'^ Upon 
D 33 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

what level were the minds of our own ances- 
tors in the early stone age of Europe? How 
did their minds then compare with the minds 
of those ancestors of the Australian who were 
then their contemporaries ? Who shall an- 
swer such questions? Yet just such ques- 
tions we should have to answer before we could 
decide upon the true relations of race and of 
mind. 

To be sure, anthropology has made a 
beginning, and a very important beginning, 
in the study of the mental types of primitive 
man. By various comparative and arch- 
aeological methods we can already learn a good 
deal about the minds of our own ancestors. 
We can also study various races as they are 
to-day. We know, about the early stages of 
human culture, far more than we knew a 
little while since. But one result may forth- 
with be stated regarding what we have so far 
learned concerning the early history of the 
human mind, whether it is the mind of our 
ancestors, or of other races. Of course, we 
cannot doubt that, just as now we widely 

34 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

differ in mental life, so always there must have 
been great contrasts between the minds of 
the various stocks of men. No doubt, if 
the science of man were exact, it would indeed 
include a race-psychology. But my present 
scepticism concerns the present state of science, 
and the result of such study as we have yet 
made of the racial psychology of man is dis- 
tinctly disappointing to those who want to 
make their task easy by insisting that the 
physical varieties of mankind are in our 
present state of knowledge sufficient guides 
to an interpretation of the whole inner con- 
trast of the characters and of the mental 
processes of men. For what anthropology 
thus far shows us is, that, so soon as you go 
back beyond those stages of cultivation where 
history is possible, and so soon as you view 
men as they are apart from the higher culture 
— well, then, all men, so far as we can yet 
study them, appear to us not, of course, the 
same in mind, but yet surprisingly alike in 
their minds, in their morals, and in their arts. 
Widely as the primitive men differ, in certain 

35 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

broad features they remain, for our present 
knowledge, notably similar. And these com- 
mon features are such as are by no means 
altogether flattering to our racial pride, when 
we think that our own ancestors, too, were, 
not very long since, comparatively, primitive 
men like the rest. 

All the more primitive men, namely, are 
largely alike in the grossness and in the un- 
promising stupidity of their superstitions, 
and in their moral defects and virtues. Very 
many of them, belonging to the most various 
races, resemble one another in possessing 
customs which we now, for the most part, 
profoundly abhor, and which we are at pres- 
ent prone to view as characteristic of es- 
sentially debased minds. Such customs as 
cannibalism, or as human sacrifice, or as the 
systematic torturing of prisoners of war, such 
horrors as those of the witchcraft from whose 
bondage Europeans escaped only since the 
seventeenth century — such things, I say, 
are characteristic of no one race of men. To 
surround one's life with a confused mass of 

36 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

spiritual horrors, to believe in ghosts, or in 
vampires, in demons, in magic, in witchcraft, 
and in hostile gods of all sorts, to tangle up 
one's daily activities in a net of superstitious 
customs, to waste time in elaborate incanta- 
tions, to live in fantastic terrors of an unseen 
world, to be terrified by tabus of all kinds, 
so that numerous sorts of useful deeds are 
superstitiously forbidden, to narrate impossible 
stories and believe in them, to live in filth, to 
persecute, to resist light, to fight against 
progress, to be mentally slothful, dull, sen- 
suous, cruel, to be the prey of endless foolish- 
ness, to be treacherous, to be destructive — 
well, these are the mental traits of no one or 
two races of men. These are simply the com- 
mon evil, traits of primitive humanity, traits to 
which our own ancestors were very long ago 
a prey, traits against which civilized man has 
still constantly to fight. Any frenzied mob of 
civilized men may relapse in an hour to the 
level of a very base savagery. All the re- 
ligions of men, without exception, and how- 
ever lofty the heights that they have since 

37 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

climbed, appear to have begun with much the 
same chaos of weird customs and of unrea- 
sonable delusions. Man's mental burdens 
have thus been, in all races, of very much the 
same sort, except, to be sure, that civilization, 
side by side with the good that it has created, 
has invented some new mental burdens, such 
as our increasing percentage of insanity in 
recent times illustrates. 

The souls of men, then, if viewed apart 
from the influences of culture, if viewed as 
they were in primitive times, are by no means 
as easy to classify as the woolly-haired and 
the straight-haired races at first appear to be. 
If you study the thoughts of the various 
peoples, as the anthropologist Bastian has 
loved to mass them together in his chaotic and 
learned monographs, or as Fraser has sur- 
veyed some of them in his " Golden Bough," 
well, these primitive thoughts appear, in all 
their own chaos, and in all their vast varieties 
of detail, to be the outcome not of racial 
differences so much as of a few essentially 
human, although by no means always very 

38 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

lofty, motives. These fundamental motives 
appear, with almost monotonous regularity, 
in the superstitions, the customs, the legends, 
of all races. Esquimaux and Australians, 
negroes and Scotch Highlanders of former 
days, ancient Japanese and Hindoos, Poly- 
nesians and early Greeks, — all these ap- 
pear side by side, in such comparative 
studies of the primitive mind of man, side 
by side as brothers in error and in ignorance, 
so soon as you proceed to study by the com- 
parative method their early magic, their old 
beliefs, their early customs. Yet only by 
such a study could you hope to distinguish 
what really belongs to the mind of a race 
of men, as distinct from what belongs to 
culture. 

If, then, it is the mind and the heart of man 
that you really want to know, you will find it 
hard, so soon as you leave civilization out of 
account, to tell what the precise meaning of the 
term "race of men" is, when that term is 
conceived as characterizing a distinct hered- 
itary variety of human mental constitution. 

39 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

A race-psychology is still a science for the 
future to discover. 

Perhaps, however, as you may say, I have 
not been just, in this very summary statement, 
to what, after all, may prove to be the best 
test of the true racial differences amongst the 
various types of the human mind. Some 
races, namely, have proved themselves to 
be capable of civilization. Other races have 
stubbornly refused civilization, or have re- 
mained helplessly degraded even when sur- 
rounded by civilization. Others still have 
perished at the first contact with civilization. 
The Germanic ancestors of the present west- 
ern Europeans were barbarians, although of 
a high type. But when they met civilization, 
they first adopted, and then improved it. 
Not so was it with the Indians, with the Poly- 
nesians. Here, then, is the test of a true 
mental difference amongst races. Watch 
them when they meet civilization. Do they 
show themselves first teachable and then 
originative.^ Then they are mentally higher 
races. Do they stagnate or die out in the 

40 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

presence of civilization? Then they are of 
the lower types. Such differences, you will 
say, are deep and ineradicable, like the differ- 
ences between the higher and the lower sorts 
of individual men. And such differences 
will enable us to define racial types of mind. 
I fully agree that this test is an important 
one. Unfortunately, the test has never been 
so fairly applied by the civilized nations of 
men that it can give us any exact results. 
Again, the facts are too complex to be esti- 
mated with accuracy. Our Germanic ances- 
tors accepted civilization when they met with it. 
Yes, but they met civilization under conditions 
peculiarly favorable to their own education. 
They had been more or less remotely in- 
fluenced by its existence, centuries before they 
entered the field of history. When they 
entered this field, they met civilization first as 
formidable foes; they were long in contact 
with it without being themselves enslaved; 
and then later, in numerous cases, they met 
civilization as conquerors, who, in the course 
of their very efforts to conquer, found thus the 

41 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

opportunity and later something of the leisure 
to learn, and who had time to discover by 
centuries of hard experience, how great were 
the advantages the cultivation of the Roman 
empire had to offer them. But suppose that 
Caesar in the first century B.C. had already 
had the opportunity to undertake the civiliza- 
tion of Germany by means of our own modern 
devices. Suppose that he had then possessed 
unlimited supplies of rum, of rifles, and of 
machine guns. Suppose in brief that, by the 
aid of such gentle arts as we now often use, 
he had very greatly abbreviated the period 
of probation and of schooling that was open to 
the German barbarians to learn the lessons that 
the cultivated peoples had to teach. Suppose 
that Roman syndicates had been ready to 
take possession, at once, of the partly depopu- 
lated lands of the north, and to keep the few 
surviving natives thenceforth in their place, by 
showing them how cultivated races can look 
down upon savage folk. Well, in that case, 
the further history of civilization might have 
gone on without the aid of the Germanic 

42 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

peoples. The latter would then have quickly 
proved their natural inferiority once for all. 
They would have furnished one instance more 
for the race-partisans to cite in order to show 
how incapable the lower races are of ascending 
from barbarism to civilization. Dead men 
not only tell no tales; they also, strange to 
say, attend no schools, and learn no lessons. 
And hereby they prove themselves in the eyes 
of certain students of race-questions to have 
been always of a much lower mental type than 
the cultivated men who killed them. Their 
surviving descendants, if sufficiently provided 
with the means of corruption, and if suffi- 
ciently down-trodden, may remain henceforth 
models of degradation. For man, whatever 
his race, is an animal that you unquestionably 
can debase to whatever level you please, if 
you only have power, and if you then begin 
early enough, and devote yourself persistently 
enough to the noble and civilized task of prov- 
ing him to be debased. 

I do not doubt, then, that some races are 
more teachable than others. But I do very 

43 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

much doubt our power to estimate how 
teachable a race is, or what can be made of 
them, or what hereditary mental powers they 
have until we have given them centuries of 
opportunity to be taught. Fortune and the 
defects of the Roman Empire gave to the 
Germanic peoples an extraordinary opportu- 
nity to learn. So the world found out how 
teachable they were. Let their descendants 
not boast unduly until they, too, have given to 
other races, not indeed the opportunities of 
conquerors, but some equal opportunity to 
show of what sort of manhood they are 
capable. 

Yet, you may insist, civilization itself had an 
origin. Were not the races that first won 
civilized rank superior in mental type to those 
that never showed themselves capable of such 
originality.^ AVell, I reply, we do not know 
as yet precisely where, and still less how, 
civilization originated. But this seems clear, 
viz. : first, that physical environment and the 
forms of social aororrecjation which this environ- 
ment determined, had a very great share in 

44 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

making the beginnings of civilization pos- 
sible; while, secondly, whatever part race- 
qualities played in early civilization, certainly 
no one race has the honor of beginning 
the process. Neither Chinese nor Egyptian, 
neither Caucasian nor Mongol, was the sole 
originator of civilization. The African of the 
tropical swamps and forests, the Australian 
of the desert, the Indian of our prairies, was 
sufficiently prevented by his physical en- 
vironment from being the originator of a 
great civilization. What each of these races 
would have done in another environment, 
we cannot tell. But the Indian of Central 
America, of Mexico, and of Peru, shows us 
that race alone did not predetermine how 
remote from the origination of a higher civili- 
zation a stock must needs remain. Chinese 
civilization, and, in recent times, Japanese 
civilization, have shown us that one need not 
be a Caucasian in order to originate a higher 
type of wisdom. 

In brief, then, there is hardly any one thing 
that our actual knowledge of the human 

45 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

mind enables us to assert, with any scientific 
exactness, regarding the permanent, the hered- 
itary, the unchangeable mental character- 
istics which distinguish even the most widely 
sundered physical varieties of mankind. There 
is, to be sure, one exception to this rule, which 
is itself instructive. It is the case where we 
are dealing with physical and social degen- 
eracy, the result of circumstances and of en- 
vironment, and where such degeneracy has 
already gone so far that we have before us 
highly diseased human types, such as can no 
longer be reclaimed. But such types are not 
racial types. They are results of alcohol, of 
infection, or in some instances, of the long- 
continued pressure of physical environment. 
In such cases we can sometimes say, Here is 
a hopelessly degraded stock of men. But, 
then, civilization can create such stocks, out 
of any race of men, by means of a sufficient 
amount of oppression and of other causes of 
degradation, if continued through generations. 
No race of men, then, can lay claim to a 
fixed and hereditary type of mental life such 

46 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

as we can now know with exactness to be 
unchangeable. We do not scientifically know 
what the true racial varieties of mental type 
really are. No doubt there are such varieties. 
The judgment day, or the science of the future, 
may demonstrate what they are. We are at 
present very ignorant regarding the whole 
matter. 

VI 

What, then, in the light of these considera- 
tions, is there which can be called funda- 
mentally significant about our numerous 
modern race-problems ? I answer, scientifi- 
cally viewed, these problems of ours turn out to 
be not so much problems caused by anything 
which is essential to the existence or to the 
nature of the races of men themselves. Our 
so-called race-problems are merely the prob- 
lems caused by our antipathies. 

Now, the mental antipathies of men, like 
the fears of men, are every elemental, wide- 
spread, and momentous mental phenomena. 
But they are also in their fimdamental nature 
extremely capricious, and extremely suggest- 

47 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

ible mental phenomena. Let an individual 
man alone, and he will feel antipathies for 
certain other human beings very much as 
any young child does — namely, quite capri- 
ciously — just as he will also feel all sorts 
of capricious likings for people. But train 
a man first to give names to his antipathies, 
and then to regard the antipathies thus named 
as sacred merely because they have a name, 
and then you get the phenomena of racial 
hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, 
and so on indefinitely. Such trained hatreds 
are peculiarly pathetic and peculiarly de- 
ceitful, because they combine in such a subtle 
way the elemental vehemence of the hatred 
that a child may feel for a stranger, or a cat 
for a dog, with the appearance of dignity and 
solemnity and even of duty which a name 
gives. Such antipathies will always play their 
part in human history. But what we can do 
about them is to try not to be fooled by them, 
not to take them too seriously because of their 
mere name. We can remember that they are 
childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena 

48 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

on a level with a dread of snakes, or of mice; 
phenomena that we share with the cats and 
with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but 
caprices of our complex nature. 

Upon the theoretical aspects of the problem 
which such antipathies present, psychology 
can already throw some light. Man, as a 
social being, needs and possesses a vast range 
of simply elemental tendencies to be socially 
sensitive when in the presence of other men. 
These elemental tendencies appear, more or 
less untrained, in the bashfulness of child- 
hood, in the stage fright of the unskilled, in 
the emotional disturbances of young people 
who are finding their way in the world, in the 
surprises of early love, in the various sorts of 
anthropophobia which beset nervous patients, 
in the antipathies of country folk toward 
strangers, in the excitements of mobs, in count- 
less other cases of social stress or of social 
novelty. Such sensitiveness may arise in 
advance of or apart from any individual 
experience which gives a conscious reason 
why one should feel thus. A common feature 
a 49 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

of all such experiences is the fact that one 
human being finds other human beings to be 
portentous, even when the socially sensitive 
being does not in the least know why they 
should be so. That such reactions have an 
instinctive basis is unquestionable. Their 
general use is that they prepare one, through 
interest in men, to be ready for social training, 
and to be submissively plastic. In milder 
forms, or upon the basis of agreeable social 
relations, such instinctive emotions easily come 
to be moulded into the most fascinating of 
human interests; and the social life is impos- 
sible without this basis of the elemental 
concerns which man feels merely because of 
the fact that other men are there in his world. 
^ If decidedly intense, however, such instinc- 
tively determined experiences are apt, like 
other intense disturbances, to be prevailingly 
painful. And since novelty, oddity, and lack 
of social training on the part of the subject con- 
cerned are motives which tend to make such 
social reflexes intense, a very great number 
of the cruder and more childish social re- 

50 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

actions involve antipathies ; for a social antip- 
athy is merely a painful, and so, in general, 
an overintense, reflex disturbance in the 
presence of another human being. No light 
need be thrown, by the mere occurrence of 
such an antipathy, upon any permanently 
important social character of the hated object. 
The chance intensity of the passing experience 
may be alone significant. And any chance 
association may serve to secure, in a given 
case, the intensity of disturbance which makes 
the object hated. Oddities of feature or of 
complexion, slight physical variations from 
the customary, a strange dress, a scar, a too 
steady look, a limp, a loud or deep voice, any 
of these peculiarities, in a stranger, may be, 
to one child, or nervous subject, or other 
sensitive observer, an object of fascinated 
curiosity; to another, slightly less stable 
observer, an intense irritation, an object of 
terror, or of violent antipathy. The significant 
fact is that we are all instinctively more or 
less sensitive to such features, simply because 
we are by heredity doomed to be interested 

51 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

in all facts which may prove to be socially 
important. Whether we are fascinated, or 
horror-stricken, or angry, is, apart from 
training, largely a matter of the momentary 
subjective intensity of the disturbance. 

But all such elemental social experiences are 
ipso facto, highly suggestible. Our social 
training largely consists in the elimination or 
in the intensification or in the systematizing 
of these original reactions through the influence 
of suggestion and of habit. Hence the antip- 
athy, once by chance aroused, but then named, 
imitated, insisted upon, becomes to its victims 
a sort of sacred revelation of truth, sacred 
merely because it is felt, a revelation merely 
because it has won a name and a social stand- 
ing. 

What such sacred revelations, however, 
really mean, is proved by the fact that the 
hungry traveller, if deprived of his breakfast 
long enough, by means of an accidental delay 
of his train, or the tired camper in the forest, 
may readily come to feel whatever racial 
antipathy you please toward his own brother, 

52 



RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES 

if the latter then wounds social susceptibilities 
which the abnormal situation has made mo- 
mentarily hypersesthetic. 

I have said little or nothing, in this paper, 
of human justice. I have spoken mainly 
of human illusions. We all have illusions, 
and hug them. Let us not sanctify them by 
the name of science. 

For my part, then, I am a member of the 
human race, and this is a race which is, as a 
whole, considerably lower than the angels, 
so that the whole of it very badly needs race- 
elevation. In this need of my race I per- 
sonally and very deeply share. And it is in 
this spirit only that I am able to approach our 
problem. 



53 



II 

PROVINCIALISM 



II 

PROVINCULISM 

X PROPOSE, in this address, to define 
-*~ certain issues which, as I think, the 
present state of the world's civilization, and 
of our own national life, make both promi- 
nent and critical. 

I 

The word " provincialism," which I have 
used as my title, has been chosen because it 
is the best single word that I have been able 
to find to suggest the group of social tenden- 
cies to which I want to call your especial 
attention. I intend to use this word in a 
somewhat elastic sense, which I may at once 
indicate. When we employ the word " pro- 
vincialism " as a concrete term, speaking of 
"a provincialism," we mean, I suppose, any 
social disposition, or custom, or form of 
speech or of civilization, which is especially 
characteristic of a province. In this sense 
one speaks of the provincialisms of the local 

57 



PROVINCIALISM 

dialect of any English shire, or of any German 
country district. This use of the term in 
relation to the dialects of any language is 
very common. But one may also apply the 
term to name, not only the peculiarities of 
a local dialect, but the fashions, the manners, 
and customs of a given restricted region of 
any country. One also often employs the 
word '* provincialism " as an abstract term, to 
name not only the customs or social tenden- 
cies themselves, but that fondness for them, 
that pride in them, which may make the 
inhabitants of a province indisposed to con- 
form to the ways of those who come from with- 
out, and anxious to follow persistently their 
own local traditions. Thus the word " pro- 
vincialism " applies both to the social habits 
of a given region, and to the mental interest 
which inspires and maintains these habits. 
But both uses of the term imply, of course, 
that one first knows what is to be meant by 
the word " province," This word, however, 
is one of an especially elastic usage. Some- 
times, by a province, we mean a region as 

58 



PROVINCIALISM 

restricted as a single English county, or as 
the smallest of the old German principalities. 
Sometimes, however, one speaks of the whole 
of New England, or even of the Southern 
states of our Union, as constituting one prov- 
ince; and I know of no easy way of defining 
how large a province may be. For the term, 
in this looser sense, stands for no deter- 
minate political or legal division of a country. 
Meanwhile we all, in our minds, oppose the 
term '* province " to the term " nation," as the 
part is opposed to the whole. Yet we also often 
oppose the terms "provincial" and "metropoli- 
tan," conceiving that the country districts and 
the smaller towns and cities belong even to the 
province, while the very great cities belong 
rather to the whole country, or even to the 
world in general. Yet here the distinction 
that we make is not the same as the former 
distinction between the part of a country and 
the whole country. Nevertheless, the ground 
for such an identification of the provincial 
with that which |)crtains to country districts 
and to smaller cities can only lie in the sup- 

59 



PROVINCIALISM 

posed tendency of the great city to represent 
better the interests of the larger whole than 
do the lesser communities. This suppo- 
sition, however, is certainly not altogether well 
founded. In the sense of possessing local 
interests and customs, and of being limited 
to ideas of their own, many great cities are 
almost as distinctly provincial as are certain 
less populous regions. The plain people of 
London or of Berlin have their local dialect; 
and it seems fair to speak of the peculiarities 
of such dialects as provincialisms. And 
almost the same holds true of the other social 
traditions peculiar to individual great cities. 
It is possible to find, even amongst the highly 
cultivated classes of ancient cities, ideas and 
fashions of behavior as characteristically 
local, as exclusive in their indifference to the 
ways of outsiders, as are the similarly char- 
acteristic ways and opinions of the country 
districts of the same nationality. And so 
the opposition of the provincial to the metro- 
politan, in manners and in beliefs, seems to 
me much less important than the other oppo- 

GO 



PROVINCIALISM 

sition of the province, as the more or less re- 
stricted part, to the nation as the whole. It 
is this latter opposition that I shall therefore 
emphasize in the present discussion. But 
I shall not attempt to define how large or 
how well organized, politically, a province 
must be. For my present purpose a county, 
a state, or even a large section of the coun- 
try, such as New England, might constitute 
a province. For me, then, a province shall 
mean any one part of a national domain, 
which is, geographically and socially, suffi- 
ciently unified to have a true consciousness 
of its own unity, to feel a pride in its own 
ideals and customs, and to possess a sense 
of its distinction from other parts of the coun- 
try. And by the term *' provincialism" I shall 
mean, first, the tendency of such a province 
to possess its own customs and ideals; sec- 
ondly, the totality of these customs and ideals 
themselves ; and thirdly, the love and pride 
which leads the inhabitants of a province to 
cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs, 
and aspirations. 

61 



PROVINCIALISM 

II 

I have defined the term used as my title. 
But now, in what sense do I propose to make 
provincialism our topic? You will foresee 
that I intend to discuss the worth of provin- 
cialism, i.e. to consider, to some extent, 
whether it constitutes a good or an evil ele- 
ment in civilization. You will properly ex- 
pect me, therefore, to compare provincialism 
with other social tendencies; such tendencies 
as patriotism, the larger love of humanity, 
and the ideals of higher cultivation. Pre- 
cisely these will constitute, in fact, the special 
topics of my address. But all that I have to 
say will group itself about a single thesis, 
which I shall forthwith announce. My thesis 
is that, in the present state of the world's 
civilization, and of the life of our own country, 
the time has come to emphasize, with a new 
meaning and intensity, the positive value, 
the absolute necessity for our welfare, of a 
wholesome provincialism, as a saving power 
to which the world in the near future will 
need more and more to appeal. 

62 



PROVINCIALISM 

The time was (and not very long since), 
when, in our own country, we had to contend 
against very grave evils due to false forms 
of provincialism. What has been called sec- 
tionalism long threatened our national unity. 
Our Civil War was fought to overcome the 
ills due to such influences. There was, 
therefore, a time when the virtue of true 
patriotism had to be founded upon a vigorous 
condemnation of certain powerful forms of 
provincialism. And our national education 
at that time depended both upon our learning 
common federal ideals, and upon our look- 
ing to foreign lands for the spiritual guid- 
ance of older civilizations. Furthermore, not 
only have these things been so in the past, 
but similar needs will, of course, be felt in 
the future. We shall always be required to 
take counsel of the other nations in company 
with whom we are at work upon the tasks 
of civilization. Nor have we outgrown our 
spiritual dependence upon older forms of 
civilization. In fact we shall never outgrow 
a certain inevitable degree of such depend- 

63 



PROVINCIALISM 

ence. Our national unity, moreover, will 
always require of us a devotion that will tran- 
scend in some directions the limits of all our 
provincial ideas. A common sympathy be- 
tween the different sections of our country 
will, in future, need a constantly fresh cultiva- 
tion. Against the evil forms of sectionalism 
we shall always have to contend. All this 
I well know, and these things I need not in 
your presence emphasize. But what I am 
to emphasize is this : The present state of 
civilization, both in the world at large, and 
with us, in America, is such as to define a new 
social mission which the province alone, but 
not the nation, is able to fulfil. False sec- 
tionalism, which disunites, will indeed always 
remain as great an evil as ever it was. 
But the modern world has reached a point 
where it needs, more than ever before, the 
vigorous development of a highly organized 
provincial life. Such a life, if wisely guided, 
will not mean disloyalty to the nation; and 
it need not mean narrowness of spirit, nor 
yet the further development of jealousies 

64 



PROVINCIALISM 

between various communities. What it will 
mean, or at least may mean, — this, so far as 
I have time, I wish to set forth in the follow- 
ing discussion. My main intention is to de- 
fine the right form and the true office of 
provincialism, — to portray what, if you 
please, we may well call the Higher Pro- 
vincialism, — to portray it, and then to de- 
fend it, to extol it, and to counsel you to 
further just such provincialism. 

Since this is my purpose, let me at once say 
that I address myself, in the most explicit 
terms, to men and women who, as I hope 
and presuppose, are and wish to be, in the 
wholesome sense, provincial. Every one, as 
I maintain, ought, ideally speaking, to be 
provincial, — and that no matter how culti- 
vated, or humanitarian, or universal in pur- 
pose or in experience he may be or may 
become. If in our own country, where often 
so many people are still comparative 
strangers to the communities in which they 
have come to live, there are some of us who, 
like myself, have changed our provinces dur- 
r 65 



PROVINCIALISM 

ing our adult years, and who have so been 
unable to become and to remain in the sense 
of European countries provincial; and if, 
moreover, the life of our American provinces 
everywhere has still too brief a tradition, — 
all that is our misfortune, and not our ad- 
vantage. As our country grows in social 
organization, there will be, in absolute meas- 
ure, more and not less provincialism amongst 
our people. To be sure, as I hope, there will 
also be, in absolute measure, more and not 
less patriotism, closer and not looser national 
ties, less and not more mutual sectional mis- 
understanding. But the two tendencies, the 
tendency toward national unity and that 
toward local independence of spirit, must 
henceforth grow together. They cannot 
prosper apart. The national unity must not 
kill out, nor yet hinder, the provincial self- 
consciousness. The loyalty to the Republic 
must not lessen the love and the local pride 
of the individual community. The man of 
the future must love his province more than 
he does to-day. His provincial customs and 

66 



PROVINCIALISM 

ideals must be more and not less highly de- 
veloped, more and not less self-conscious, 
well-established, and earnest. And therefore, 
I say, I appeal to you as to a company of 
people who are, and who mean to be, pro- 
vincial as well as patriotic, — servants and 
lovers of your own community and of its ways, 
as well as citizens of the world. I hope and 
believe that you all intend to have your com- 
munity live its own life, and not the life of 
any other community, nor yet the life of a 
mere abstraction called humanity in general. 
I hope that you are fully aware how pro- 
vincialism, like monogamy, is an essential 
basis of true civilization. And it is with this 
presupposition that I undertake to suggest 
something toward a definition and defence 
of the higher provincialism and of its office 
in civilization. 

in 

With this programme in mind, let me first 
tell you what seem to me to be in our mod- 
ern world, and, in particular, in our American 
world, the principal evils which are to be cor- 

67 



PROVINCIALISM 

reeled by a further development of a true 
provincial spirit, and which cannot be cor- 
rected without such a development. 

The first of these evils I have already men- 
tioned. It is a defect incidental, partly to 
the newness of our own country, but partly 
also to those world-wide conditions of mod- 
ern life which make travel, and even a change 
of home, both attractive and easy to dwellers 
in the most various parts of the globe. In 
nearly every one of our American communi- 
ties, at least in the northern and in the western 
regions of our country, there is a rather large 
proportion of people who either have not 
grown up where they were born, or who have 
changed their dwelling-place in adult years. 
I can speak all the more freely regarding this 
class of our communities, because, in my own 
community, I myself, as a native of California, 
now resident in New England, belong to such 
a class. Such classes, even in modern New 
England, are too large. The stranger, the 
sojourner, the newcomer, is an inevitable 
factor in the life of most American communi- 

68 



PROVINCIALISM 

ties. To make him welcome is one of the 
most gracious of the tasks in which our people 
have become expert. To give him his fair 
chance is the rule of our national life. But 
it is not on the whole well when the affairs of 
a community remain too largely under the 
influence of those who mainly feel either the 
wanderer's or the new resident's interest in 
the region where they are now dwelling. To 
offset the social tendencies due to such fre- 
quent changes of dwelling-place we need the 
further development and the intensification 
of the community spirit. The sooner the new 
resident learns to share this spirit, the better 
for him and for his community. A sound 
instinct, therefore, guides even our newer 
communities, in the more fortunate cases, to 
a rapid development of such a local senti- 
ment as makes the stranger feel that he must 
in due measure conform if he would be per- 
manently welcome, and must accept the local 
spirit if he is to enjoy the advantages of his 
community. As a Californian I have been 
interested to see both the evidences and the 

69 



PROVINCIALISM 

nature of this rapid evolution of the genuine 
provincial spirit in my own state. How 
swiftly, in that country, the Calif ornians of 
the early days seized upon every suggestion 
that could give a sense of the unique impor- 
tance of their new provincial life. The asso- 
ciations that soon clustered about the tales of 
the life of Spanish missionaries and Mexican 
colonists in the years before 1846, — these 
our American Californians cherished from 
the outset. This, to us often half-legendary 
past, gave us a history of our own. The 
wondrous events of the early mining life, — 
how earnestly the pioneers later loved to re- 
hearse that story ; and how proud every young 
Californian soon became of the fact that his 
father had had his part therein. Even the 
Californian's well-known and largely justified 
glorification of his climate was, in his own 
mind, part of the same expression of his ten- 
dency to idealize whatever tended to make 
his community, and all its affairs, seem unique, 
beloved, and deeply founded upon some sig- 
nificant natural basis. Such a foundation 

70 



PROVINCIALISM 

was, indeed, actually there; nature had, 
indeed, richly blessed his land; but the real 
interest that made one emphasize and idealize 
all these things, often so boastfully, was the 
interest of the loyal citizen in finding his com- 
munity an object of pride. Now you, who 
know well your own local history, will be able 
to observe the growth amongst you of this ten- 
dency to idealize your past, to glorify the 
bounties that nature has showered upon you, 
all in such wise as to give the present life of 
your community more dignity, more honor, 
more value in the eyes of yourselves and of 
strangers. In fact, that we all do thus glorify 
our various provinces, we well know; and 
with what feelings we accompany the process, 
we can all observe for ourselves. But it is 
well to remember that the special office, the 
principal use, the social justification, of such 
mental tendencies in ourselves lies in the aid 
that they give us in becoming loyal to our 
community, and in assimilating to our own 
social order the strangers that are within our 
gates. It is the especial art of the colonizing 

71 



PROVINCIALISM 

peoples, such as we are, and such as the Eng- 
lish are, to be able by devices of this sort 
rapidly to build up in their own minds a pro- 
vincial loyalty in a new environment. The 
French, who are not a colonizing people, 
seem to possess much less of this tendency. 
The Chinese seem to lack it almost altogether. 
Our own success as possessors of new lands 
depends upon this one skill in making the new 
lands where we came to dwell soon seem to us 
glorious and unique. I was much impressed, 
some years ago, during a visit to Australia 
and New Zealand, with the parallel devel- 
opments in the Australasian colonies. They 
too have already their glorious past history, 
their unique fortunes, their romances of the 
heroic days, — and, in consequence, their 
provincial loyalty and their power to assimi- 
late their newcomers. So learn to view your 
new community that every stranger who 
enters it shall at once feel the dignity of its 
past, and the unique privilege that is offered 
to him when he is permitted to belong to its 
company of citizens, — this is the first rule 

72 



PROVINCIALISM 

of the people of every colonizing nation when 
they found a new province. 

Thus, then, I have pointed out the first evil 
with which our provincialism has to deal — 
the evil due to the presence of a considerable 
number of not yet assimilated newcomers in 
most of our communities. The newcomers 
themselves are often a boon and welcome in- 
deed. But their failure to be assimilated 
constitutes, so long as it endures, a source of 
social danger, because the community needs 
well-knit organization. We meet this danger 
by the development of a strong provincial 
spirit amongst those who already constitute 
the centralized portion of the community. 
For thus a dignity is given to the social order 
which makes the newcomer long to share in its 
honors by deserving its confidence. But this 
aspect of provincialism, this usefulness of local 
pride, is indeed the best known aspect of my 
topic. I pass at once to the less frequently 
recognized uses of the provincial spirit, by 
mentioning the second of the evils with which 
a wise provincialism is destined to contend. 

73 



PROVINCIALISM 



IV 



This second modern evil arises from, and 
constitutes, one aspect of the levelling ten- 
dency of recent civilization. That such a 
levelling tendency exists, most of us recognize. 
That it is the office of the province to contend 
against some of the attendant evils of this ten- 
dency, we less often observe. By the level- 
ling tendency in question I mean that aspect 
of modern civilization which is most obvi- 
ously suggested by the fact that, because of 
the ease of communication amongst distant 
places, because of the spread of popular edu- 
cation, and because of the consolidation and 
of the centralization of industries and of 
social authorities, we tend all over the nation, 
and, in some degree, even throughout the 
civilized world, to read the same daily news, 
to share the same general ideas, to submit to 
the same overmastering social forces, to live 
in the same external fashions, to discourage 
individuality, and to approach a dead level 
of harassed mediocrity. One of the most 

74 



PROVINCIALISM 

marked of all social tendencies is in any age 
that toward the mutual assimilation of men 
in so far as they are in social relations with one 
another. One of the strongest human pre- 
dispositions is that toward imitation. But 
our modern conditions have greatly favored 
the increase of the numbers of people who 
read the same books and newspapers, who 
repeat the same phrases, who follow the same 
social fashions, and who thus, in general, imi- 
tate one another in constantly more and more 
ways. The result is a tendency to crush the 
individual. Furthermore there are modern 
economic and industrial developments, too 
well known to all of you to need any detailed 
mention here, which lead toward similar 
results. The independence of the small 
trader or manufacturer becomes lost in the 
great commercial or industrial combination. 
The vast corporation succeeds and displaces 
tlie individual. Ingenuity and initiative be- 
come subordinated to the discipline of an 
impersonal social order. And each man, 
becoming, like his fellow, the servant of mas- 

75 



PROVINCIALISM 

ters too powerful for him to resist, and too 
complex in their undertakings for him to 
understand, is, in so far, disposed unobtru- 
sively to conform to the ways of his in- 
numerable fellow-servants, and to lose all 
sense of his unique moral destiny as an in- 
dividual. 

I speak here merely of tendencies. As 
you know, they are nowhere unopposed ten- 
dencies. Nor do I for an instant pretend to 
call even these levelling tendencies wholly, or 
principally, evil. But for the moment I call 
attention to what are obviously questionable, 
and in some degree are plainly evil, aspects 
of these modern tendencies. Imitation is a 
good thing. All civilization depends upon 
it. But there may be a limit to the number of 
people who ought to imitate precisely the same 
body of ideas and customs. For imitation is 
not man's whole business. There ought to 
be some room left for variety. Modern con- 
ditions have often increased too much what 
one might call the purely mechanical carrying- 
power of certain ruling social influences. 

76 



PROVINCIALISM 

There are certain metropolitan newspapers, 
for instance, which have far too many readers 
for the good of the social order in which they 
circulate. These newspapers need not al- 
ways be very mischievous ones. But when 
read by too vast multitudes, they tend to pro- 
duce a certain monotonously uniform trivi- 
ality of mind in a large proportion of our 
city and suburban population. It would be 
better if the same readers were divided into 
smaller sections, which read difTerent news- 
papers, even if these papers were of no higher 
level. For then there would at least be a 
greater variety in the sorts of triviality which 
from day to day occupied their minds. And 
variety is the beginning of individual inde- 
pendence of insight and of conviction. As for 
the masses of people who are under the domi- 
nation of the great corporations that employ 
them, I am here not in the least dwelling 
upon their economic difficulties. I am point- 
ing out that the lack of initiative in their 
lives tends to make their spiritual range 
narrower. They are too little disposed to 

77 



PROVINCIALISM 

create their own world. Now every man who 
gets into a vital relation to God's truth be- 
comes, in his own way, a creator. And if 
you deprive a man of all incentive to create, 
you in so far tend to cut him off from God's 
truth. Or, in more common language, in- 
dependence of spirit flourishes only when a 
man at least believes that he has a chance to 
change his fortunes if he persistently wills to 
do so. But the servant of some modern 
forms of impersonal social organization tends 
to lose this belief that he has a chance. Hence 
he tends to lose independence of spirit. 

Well, this is the second of the evils of the 
modern world which, as I have said, pro- 
vincialism may tend to counteract. Local 
spirit, local pride, provincial independence, 
influence the individual man precisely because 
they appeal to his imitative tendencies. But 
thereby they act so as to render him more or 
less immune in presence of the more trivial 
of the influences that, coming from without 
his community, would otherwise be likely to 
reduce him to the dead level of the customs 

78 



PROVINCIALISM 

of the whole nation. A country district may 
seem to a stranger unduly crude in its ways; 
but it does not become wiser in case, under 
the influence of city newspapers and of summer 
boarders, it begins to follow city fashions 
merely for the sake of imitating. Other 
things being equal, it is better in proportion 
as it remains self-possessed, — proud of its 
own traditions, not unwilling indeed to learn, 
but also quite ready to teach the stranger its 
own wisdom. And in similar fashion provin- 
cial pride helps the individual man to keep 
his self-respect even when the vast forces 
that work toward industrial consolidation, 
and toward the effacement of individual 
initiative, are besetting his life at every turn. 
For a man is in large measure what his social 
consciousness makes him. Give him the 
local community that he loves and cherishes, 
that he is proud to honor and to serve, — 
make his ideal of that community lofty, — give 
him faith in the dignity of his province, — and 
you have given him a power to counteract the 
levelling tendencies of modern civilization. 

79 



PROVINCIALISM 



The third of the evils with which a wise 
provincialism must contend is closely con- 
nected with the second. I have spoken of 
the constant tendency of modern life to the 
mutual assimilation of various parts of the 
social order. Now this assimilation may oc- 
cur slowly and steadily, as in great measure 
it normally does; or, on the other hand, it 
may take more sudden and striking forms, at 
moments when the popular mind is excited, 
when great emotions affect the social order. 
At such times of emotional disturbance, so- 
ciety is subject to tendencies which have 
recently received a good deal of psychological 
study. They are the tendencies to constitute 
what has often been called the spirit of the 
crowd or of the mob. Modern readers of 
the well-known book of Le Bon's on "The 
Crowd " well know what the tendencies to 
which I refer may accomplish. It is true that 
the results of Le Bon are by no means wholly 
acceptable. It is true that the psychology of 

80 



PROVINCIALISM 

large social masses is still insuflSciently under- 
stood, and that a great many hasty statements 
have been made about the fatal tendency of 
great companies of people to go wrong. Yet 
in the complex world of social processes 
there can be no doubt that there exist such 
processes as the ones which Le Bon charac- 
terizes. The mob-spirit is a genuine psy- 
chological fact which occasionally becomes 
important in the life of all numerous com- 
munities. Moreover, the mob-spirit is no new 
thing. It has existed in some measure from 
the very beginning of social life. But there 
are certain modern conditions which tend to 
give the mob-spirit new form and power, 
and to lead to new social dangers that 
are consequent upon the presence of this 
spirit. 

I use the term " mob-spirit " as an abbrevi- 
ation for a very large range of phenomena, 
phenomena which may indeed be classed 
with all the rest of the imitative phenomena 
as belonging to one genus. But the mob- 
phenomena are distinguished from the other 
o 81 



PROVINCIALISM 

imitative phenomena by certain character- 
istic emotional tendencies which belong to 
excited crowds of people, and which do not 
belong to the more strictly normal social 
activities. Man, as an imitative animal, natu- 
rally tends, as we have seen, to do what- 
ever his companions do, so long as he is not 
somehow aroused to independence and to 
individuality. Accordingly, he easily shares 
the beliefs and temperaments of those who are 
near enough to him to influence him. But 
now suppose a condition of things such as may 
readily occur in any large group of people 
who have somehow come to feel strong sym- 
pathy with one another, and who are for any 
reason in a relatively passive and impres- 
sible state of mind. In such a company of 
people let any idea which has a strong emo- 
tional coloring come to be suggested, by the 
words of the leader, by the singing of a song, 
by the beginning of any social activity that 
does not involve clear thinking, that does not 
call upon a man to assert his own independence. 
Such an idea forthwith tends to take pos- 

82 



PROVINCIALISM 

session in an extraordinarily strong degree of 
every member of the social group in question. 
As a consequence, the individual may come 
to be, as it were, hypnotized by his social 
group. He may reach a stage where he not 
merely lacks a disposition to individual initi- 
ative, but becomes for the time simply unable 
to assert himself, to think his own thoughts, 
or even to remember his ordinary habits 
and principles of conduct. His judgment 
for the time becomes one with that of the 
mass. He may not himself observe this fact. 
Like the hypnotized subject, the member of 
the excited mob may feel as if he were very 
independently expressing himself. He may 
say: "This idea is my own idea," when as a 
fact the ruling idea is suggested by the leaders 
of the mob, or even by the accident of the 
momentary situation. The individual may 
be led to acts of which he says: "These 
things are my duty, my sacred privilege, my 
right," when as a fact the acts in question 
are forced upon him by the suggestions of 
the social mass of which at the instant he is 

83 



PROVINCIALISM 

merely a helpless member. As the hypno- 
tized subject, again, thinks his will free when 
an observer can see that he is obliged to follow 
the suggestions of the hypnotizer, so the mem- 
ber of the mob may feel all the sense of pure 
initiative, although as a fact he is in bondage 
to the will of another, to the motives of the 
moment. 

All such phenomena are due to very deep- 
seated and common human tendencies. It 
is no individual reproach to any one of us 
that, under certain conditions, he would lose 
his individuality and become the temporary 
prey of the mob-spirit. Moreover, by the 
word "mob" itself, or by the equivalent word 
"crowd," I here mean no term that reflects 
upon the personal characters or upon the 
private intelligence of the individuals who 
chance to compose any given mob. In for- 
mer ages when the defenders of aristocratic 
or of monarchical institutions used to speak 
with contempt of the mob, and oppose to the 
mob the enlightened portion of the com- 
munity, the wise who ought to rule, or the 

84 



1 



PROVINCIALISM 

people whom birth and social position se- 
cured against the defects of the mob, the term 
was used without a true understanding of the 
reason why crowds of people are upon occa- 
sion disposed to do things that are less in- 
telligent than the acts of normal and thought- 
ful people would be. For the modern student 
of the pyschology of crowds, a crowd or a mob 
means not in any wise a company of wicked, 
of debased, or even of ignorant persons. 
The term means merely a company of people 
who, by reason of their sympathies, have 
for the time being resigned their individual 
judgment. A mob might be a mob of saints 
or of cutthroats, of peasants or of men of 
science. If it were a mob it would lack due 
social wisdom whatever its membership might 
be. For the members of the mob are sympa- 
thizing rather than criticising. Their ruling 
ideas then, therefore, are what Le Bon calls 
atavistic ideas; ideas such as belong to earlier 
and cruder periods of civilization. Opposed 
to the mob in which the good sense of indi- 
viduals is lost in a blur of emotion, and in 

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PROVINCIALISM 

a helpless suggestibility, — opposed to the 
mob, I say, is the small company of thought- 
ful individuals who are taking counsel to- 
gether. Now our modern life, with its vast 
unions of people, with its high development 
of popular sentiments, with its passive and 
sympathetic love for knowing and feeling 
whatever other men know and feel, is sub- 
ject to the disorders of larger crowds, of more 
dangerous mobs, than have ever before been 
brought into sympathetic union. One great 
problem of our time, then, is how to carry on 
popular government without being at the 
mercy of the mob-spirit. It is easy to give 
this mob-spirit noble names. Often you hear 
of it as "grand popular enthusiasm." Often 
it is highly praised as a loyal party spirit or 
as patriotism. But psychologically it is the 
mob-spirit whenever it is the spirit of a large 
company of people who are no longer either 
taking calm counsel together in small groups, 
or obeving an alreadv established law or cus- 
tom, but who are merelv svuipathiziui:: with 
one another, listening to the words of leaders, 



PROVINCIALISM 

and believing the large print headings of their 
newspapers. Every sueh company of people 
is, in so far, a mob. Though they spoke with 
the tongues of men and of angels, you could 
not then trust them. Wisdom is not in them 
nor in their mood. However highly trained 
they may be as individuals, their mental 
processes, as a mob, are degraded. Their 
suffrages, as a mob, ought not to count. 
Their deeds come of evil. The next mob 
may undo their work. Accident may ren- 
der their enthusiasm relatively harmless. 
But, as a mere crowd, they cannot be wise. 
They cannot be safe rulers. Who, then, 
are the men who wisely think and rightly 
guide.' They are, I repeat, the men who 
take counsel together in small groups, who re- 
spect one another's individuality, who mean- 
while criticise one another constantly, and 
earnestly, and who suspect whatever the 
crowd teaches. In such men there need be 
no lack of wise sympathy, but there is much 
besides sympathy. There is individuality, and 
there is a willingness to doubt both one 

87 



PROVINCIALISM 

another and themselves. To such men, and 
to such groups, popular government ought 
to be intrusted. 

Now these principles are responsible for 
the explanation of the well-known contrast 
between those social phenomena which illus- 
trate the wisdom of the enlightened social 
order, and the phenomena which, on the con- 
trary, often seem such as to make us despair 
for the moment of the permanent success of 
popular government. In the rightly consti- 
tuted social group where every member feels 
his own responsibility for his part of the social 
enterprise which is in hand, the result of the 
interaction of individuals is that the social 
group may show itself wiser than any of its 
individuals. In the mere crowd, on the 
other hand, the social group may be, and 
generally is, more stupid than any of its indi- 
vidual members. Compare a really success- 
ful town meeting in a comparatively small 
community with the accidental and some- 
times dangerous social phenomena of a street 
mob or of a great political convention. In 

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PROVINCIALISM 

the one case every individual may gain wis- 
dom from his contact with the social group. 
In the other case every man concerned, if 
ever he comes again to himself, may feel 
ashamed of the absurdity of which the whole 
company was guilty. Social phenomena of 
the type that may result from the higher 
social group, the group in which individuality 
is respected, even while social loyalty is de- 
manded, — these phenomena may lead to 
permanent social results which as tradition 
gives them a fixed character may gradually 
lead to the formation of permanent institu- 
tions, in which a wisdom much higher than 
that of any individual man may get em- 
bodied. A classic instance of social phe- 
nomena of this type, and of the results of 
such social activities as constantly make use 
of individual skill, we find in language. 
However human language originated, it is 
certain that it was never the product of 
the mob-spirit. Language has been formed 
through the efforts of individuals to communi- 
cate with other individuals. Human speech 

89 



PROVINCIALISM 

is, therefore, in its structure, in its devices, in 
its thoughtful ness, essentially the product of 
the social activities of comparatively small 
groups of persons whose ingenuity was con- 
stantly aroused by the desire of making some 
form of social cooperation definite, and some 
form of communication amongst individuals 
effective. The consequence is that the lan- 
guage of an uncultivated people, who have 
as yet no grammarians to guide them and no 
literature to transmit the express wisdom of 
individual guides from generation to genera- 
tion, may, nevertheless, be on the whole much 
more intelligent than is any individual that 
speaks the language. 

Other classic instances of social processes 
wherein the group appears wiser than the 
individual are furnished to us by the processes 
that resulted through centuries of develop- 
ment in the production of the system of 
Roman law or of the British constitution. 
Such institutions embody more wisdom than 
any individual who has taken part in the 
production of these institutions has everpos- 

90 



PROVINCIALISM 

sessed. Now the common characteristic of 
all such social products seems to me to be due 
to the fact that the social groups in which 
they originated were always such as encour- 
aged and as in fact necessitated an emphasis 
upon the contrasts between various indi- 
viduals. In such groups what Tarde has 
called "the universal opposition" has always 
been an efl'ective motive. The group has 
depended upon the variety and not the uni- 
formity of its members. On the other hand, 
the other sort of social group, the mob, has 
depended upon the emotional agreement, 
the sympathy, of its members. It has been 
powerful only in so far as they forgot who 
they individually were, and gave themselves 
up to the suggestions of the moment. 

It follows that if we are to look for the 
source of the greatest dangers of popular gov- 
ernment, we must expect to find them in the 
influence of the mob-spirit. Le Bon is right 
when he says that the problem of the future 
will become more and more the pro])lem 
how to escape from the domination of the 

91 



PROVINCIALISM 

crowd. Now I do not share Le Bon's pessi- 
mism when he holds, as he seems to do, that 
all popular government necessarily involves 
the tendency to the prevalence of the mob- 
spirit. So far as I can see Le Bon and most 
of the other writers who in recent times have 
laid so much stress upon the dangers of the 
mob, have ignored, or at least have greatly 
neglected, that other social tendency, that 
tendency to the formation of smaller social 
groups, which makes use of the contrasts of 
individuals, and which leads to a collective 
wisdom greater than any individual wisdom. 
But why I do insist upon this is that the prob- 
lem of the future for popular government 
must involve the higher development, the 
better organization, the more potent influence, 
of the social groups of the wiser type, and the 
neutralization through their influence of the 
power of the mob-spirit. Now the modern 
forms of the mob-spirit have become so por- 
tentous because of a tendency that is in itself 
very good, even as may be the results to which 
it often leads. This tendency is that toward 

92 



PROVINCIALISM 

a very wide and inclusive human sympathy, 
a sympathy which may be as undiscriminat- 
ing as it often is kindly. Sympathy, how- 
ever, as one must recollect, is not necessarily 
even a kindly tendency. For one may sym- 
pathize with any emotion, — for instance, 
with the emotions of a cruelly ferocious mob. 
Sympathy itself is a sort of neutral basis 
for more rational mental development. The 
noblest structures may be reared upon its 
soil. The basest absurdities may, upon occa- 
sion, seem to be justified, because an undis- 
criminating sympathy makes them plausible. 
Now modern conditions have certainly tended, 
as I have said, to the spread of sympathy. 
Consider modern literature with its disposi- 
tion to portray any form of human life, how- 
ever ignoble or worthless, or on the other 
hand, however lofty or inspiring, — to por- 
tray it not because of its intrinsic worth but 
because of the mere fact that it exists. All 
sorts and conditions of men, — yes, all sorts 
and conditions of emotion, however irrational, 
have their hearing in the world of art to-day, 

93 



PROVINCIALISM 

win their expression, charm their audience, 
get, as we say, their recognition. Never were 
men so busy as now with the mere eagerness 
to sympathize with, to feel whatever is the lot 
of any portion of humanity. Now, as I have 
said, this spread of human sympathy, fur- 
thered as it is by all the means at the disposal 
of modern science, so far as that science deals 
with humanity, is a good thing just in so far 
as it is a basis upon which a rational phi- 
lanthropy and a more intelligent social or- 
ganization can be founded. But this habit 
of sympathy disposes us more and more to 
the influence of the mob. When the time of 
popular excitement comes, it finds us expert 
in sharing the emotions of the crowd, but 
often enervated by too frequent indulgence 
in just such emotion. The result is that 
modern mobs are much vaster, and in some 
respects more excitable than ever they were 
before. The psychological conditions of the 
mob no longer need include the physical pres- 
ence of a crowd of people in a given place. 
It is enough if the newspapers, if the theatre, 

94 



PROVINCIALISM 

if the other means of social communication, 
serve to transmit the waves of emotional en- 
thusiasm. A nation composed of many mill- 
ions of people may fall rapidly under the 
hypnotic influence of a few leaders, of a few 
fatal phrases. And thus, as our third evil, 
we have not only the general levelling ten- 
dency of modern social life, but the particular 
tendency to emotional excitability which tends 
to make the social order, under certain con- 
ditions, not only monotonous and unideal, 
but actively dangerous. 

Yet, as we have seen, this evil is not, as Le 
Bon and the pessimists would have it, inherent 
in the very fact of the existence of a social 
order. There are social groups that are not 
subject to the mob-spirit. And now if you 
ask how such social groups are nowadays to 
be fostered, to be trained, to be kept alive for 
the service of the nation, I answer that the 
place for fostering such groups is the province, 
for such groups flourish under conditions that 
arouse local pride, the loyalty to one's own 
community, the willingness to remember one's 

95 



PROVINCIALISM 

own ways and ideals, even at the moment 
when the nation is carried away by some 
levelling emotion. The lesson would then be : 
Keep the province awake, that the nation may 
be saved from the disastrous hypnotic slumber 
so characteristic of excited masses of mankind. 

IV 

I have now reviewed three types of evils 
against which I think it is the office of pro- 
vincialism to contend. As I review these 
evils, I am reminded somewhat of the famous 
words of Schiller in his " Greeting to the New 
Century," which he composed at the outset 
of the nineteenth century. In his age, which 
in some respects was so analogous to our own, 
despite certain vast differences, Schiller found 
himself overwhelmed as he contemplated the 
social problem of the moment by the vast 
national conflict, and the overwhelming forces 
which seemed to him to be crushing the more 
ideal life of his nation, and of humanity. 
With a poetic despair that we need indeed no 
longer share, Schiller counsels his reader, in 

96 



PROVINCIALISM 

certain famous lines, to flee from the stress of 
life into the still recesses of the heart, for, as he 
says, beauty lives only in song, and freedom 
has departed into the realm of dreams. Now 
Schiller spoke in the romantic period. We 
no longer intend to flee from our social ills 
to any realm of dreams. And as to the re- 
cesses of the heart, we now remember that 
out of the heart are the issues of life. But so 
much my own thesis and my own counsel 
would share in common with Schiller's words. 
I should say to-day that our national unities 
have grown so vast, our forces of social con- 
solidation have become so paramount, the re- 
sulting problems, conflicts, evils, have been so 
intensified, that we, too, must flee in the pur- 
suit of the ideal to a new realm. Only this 
realm is, to my mind, so long as we are speak- 
ing of social problems, a realm of real life. It 
is the realm of the province. There must 
we flee from the stress of the now too vast and 
problematic life of the nation as a whole. 
There we must flee, I mean, not in the sense 
of a cowardly and permanent retirement, but 
H 97 



PROVINCIALISM 

in the sense of a search for renewed strength, 
for a social inspiration, for the salvation of 
the individual from the overwhelming forces 
of consolidation. Freedom, I should say, 
dwells now in the small social group, and has 
its securest home in the provincial life. The 
nation by itself, apart from the influence of 
the province, is in danger of becoming an in- 
comprehensible monster, in whose presence 
the individual loses his right, his self-conscious- 
ness, and his dignity. The province must 
save the individual. 

But, you may ask, in what way do I con- 
ceive that the wise provincialism of which I 
speak ought to undertake and carry on its 
task ? How is it to meet the evils of which I 
have been speaking.^ In what way is its in- 
fluence to be exerted against them ? And 
how can the province cultivate its self-con- 
sciousness without tending to fall back again 
into the ancient narrowness from which small 
communities were so long struggling to es- 
cape.'^ How can we keep broad humanity 
and yet cultivate provincialism ? How can 



PROVINCIALISM 

we be loyally patriotic, and yet preserve our 
consciousness of the peculiar and unique 
dignity of our own community ? In what 
form are our wholesome provincial activities 
to be carried on ? 

I answer, of course, in general terms, that 
the problem of the wholesome provincial 
consciousness is closely allied to the problem 
of any individual form of activity. An indi- 
vidual tends to become narrow when he is 
what we call self-centred. But, on the other 
hand, philanthropy that is not founded upon 
a personal loyalty of the individual to his own 
family and to his own personal duties is noto- 
riously a worthless abstraction. We love the 
world better when we cherish our own friends 
the more faithfully. We do not grow in 
grace by forgetting individual duties in be- 
half of remote social enterprises. Precisely 
so, the province will not serve the nation best 
l)y forgetting itself, but by loyally emphasiz- 
ing its own duty to the nation and therefore 
its right to attain and to cultivate its own 
uni(|uc wisdom. Now all tliis is indeed ob- 

99 



PROVINCIALISM 

vious enough, but this is precisely what in 
our days of vast social consolidation we are 
some of us tendino: to forget. 

Now as to the more concrete means whereby 
the wholesome provincialism is to be culti- 
vated and encouraged, let me appeal directly 
to the loyal member of any provincial com- 
munity, be it the community of a small town, 
or of a great city, or of a country district. 
Let me point out what kind of work is needed 
in order to cultivate that wise provincialism 
which, as you see, I wish to have grow not 
in opposition to the interests of the nation, 
but for the verv sake of savinof the nation from 
the modern evil tendencies of which I have 
spoken. 

First, then, I should say a wholesome pro- 
vincialism is founded upon the thought that 
while local pride is indeed a praiseworthy 
accompaniment of every form of social activity, 
our province, like our own individuality, 
ought to be to all of us rather an ideal than a 
mere boast. And here, as I think, is a matter 
which is too often forgotten. Evervthing 

KX) 



PROVINCIALISM 

valuable is, in our present human life, known 
to us as an ideal before it beeomes an attain- 
ment, and in view of our human imperfec- 
tions, remains to the end of our short lives 
much more a hope and an inspiration than it 
becomes a present achievement. Just be- 
cause the true issues of human life are brought 
to a finish not in time but in eternity, it is 
necessary that in our temporal existence what 
is most worthy should appear to us as an 
ideal, as an Ought, rather than as something 
that is already in our hands. The old saying 
about the bird in the hand being worth two 
in the bush does not rightly apply to the ideal 
goods of a moral agent working under human 
limitations. For him the very value of life 
includes the fact that its goal as something 
infinite can never at any one instant be at- 
tained. In this fact the moral agent glories, 
for it means that he has something to do. 
Hence the ideal in the bush, so to speak, 
is always worth infinitely more to him than 
the food or the plaything of time that hap- 
pens to be just now in his hands. Theditl'er- 

101 



PROVINCIALISM 

ence between vanity and self-respect depends 
largely upon this emphasizing of ideals in the 
case of the higher forms of self-consciousness, 
as opposed to the emphasis upon transient 
temporal attainments in the case of the lower 
forms. Now what holds true of individual 
self-consciousness ought to hold true of the 
self-consciousness of the community. Boast- 
ing is often indeed harmless and may prove a 
stimulus to good work. It is therefore to be 
indulged as a tribute to our human weakness. 
But the better aspect of our provincial con- 
sciousness is always its longing for the improve- 
ment of the community. 

And now, in the second place, a wise pro- 
vincialism remembers that it is one thing to 
seek to make ideal values in some unique 
sense our own, and it is quite another thing 
to believe that if they are our own, other 
people cannot possess such ideal values in 
their own equally unique fashion. A realm 
of genuinely spiritual individuality is one 
where each individual has his own unique 
significance, so that none could take another's 

102 



PROVINCIALISM 

place. But for just that very reason all the 
unique individuals of the truly spiritual order 
stand in relation to the same universal light, 
to the same divine whole in relation to which 
they win their individuality. Hence all the 
individuals of the true spiritual order have 
ideal goods in common, as the very means 
whereby they can win each his individual 
place with reference to the possession and the 
employment of these common goods. Well, 
it is with provinces as with individuals. The 
way to win independence is by learning 
freely from abroad, but by then insisting upon 
our own interpretation of the common good. 
A generation ago the Japanese seemed to 
most European observers to be entering upon 
a career of total self-surrender. They seemed 
to be adopting without stint European cus- 
toms and ideals. They seemed to be aban- 
doning their own national independence of 
spirit. They appeared to be purely imitative 
in their main purposes. They asked other 
nations where the skill of modern sciences 
lay, and how the new powers were to be gained 

103 



PROVINCIALISM 

by them. They seemed to accept with the 
utmost docility every lesson, and to abandon 
with unexampled submissiveness, their pur- 
pose to remain themselves. Yet those of us 
who have watched them since, or who have 
become acquainted with representative Jap- 
anese students, know how utterly super- 
ficial and illusory that old impression of ours 
was regarding the dependence, or the extreme 
imitativeness, or the helpless docility, of the 
modern Japanese. He has now taught us 
quite another lesson. With a curious and 
on the whole not unjust spiritual wiliness, he 
has learned indeed our lesson, but he has 
given it his own interpretation. You always 
feel in intercourse with a Japanese how un- 
conquerable the spirit of his nation is, how 
inaccessible the recesses of his spirit have re- 
mained after all these years of free intercourse 
with Europeans. In your presence the 
Japanese always remains the courteous and 
respectful learner so long as he has reason to 
think that you have anything to teach him. 
But he remains as absolutely his own master 

104 



PROVINCIALISM 

with regard to the interpretation, the use, 
the possession of all spiritual gifts, as if he 
were the master and you the learner. He ac- 
cepts the gifts, but their place in his national 
and individual life is his own. And we now 
begin to see that the feature of the Japanese 
nationality as a member of the civilized com- 
pany of nations is to be something quite 
unique and independent. Well, let the Jap- 
anese give us a lesson in the spirit of true pro- 
vincialism. Provincialism does not mean a 
lack of plasticity, an unteachable spirit; it 
means a determination to use the spiritual 
gifts that come to us from abroad in our own 
way and with reference to the ideals of our 
own social order. 

And therefore, thirdly, I say in developing 
your provincial spirit, be quite willing to en- 
courage your young men to have relations 
with other communities. But on the other 
hand, encourage them also to make use of 
what they thus acquire for the furtherance 
of the life of their own community. Let 
them win aid from abroad, but let them also 

105 



PROVINCIALISM 

have, so far as possible, an opportunity to use 
this which they acquire in the service of their 
home. Of course economic conditions rather 
than deliberate choice commonly determine 
how far the youth of a province are able to 
remain for their lifetime in a place where they 
grow up. But so far as a provincial spirit is 
concerned, it is well to avoid each of two ex- 
tremes in the treatment of the young men of 
the community, — extremes that I have too 
often seen exemplified. The one extreme 
consists in maintaining that if young men 
mean to be loyal to their own province, to 
their own state, to their own home, they ought 
to show their loyalty by an unwillingness to 
seek guidance from foreign literature, from 
foreign lands, in the patronizing of foreign 
or distant institutions, or in the acceptance of 
the customs and ideas of other communities 
than their own. Against this extreme let the 
Japanese be our typical instance. They have 
wandered far. They have studied abroad. 
They have assimilated the lore of other com- 
munities. And they have only gained in 

106 



PROVINCIALISM 

local consciousness, in independence of spirit, 
by the ordeal. The other extreme is the one 
expressed in that tendency to wander and to 
encourage wandering, which has led so many 
of our communities to drive away the best 
and most active of their young men. We 
want more of the determination to find, if 
possible, a place for our youth in their own 
communities. 

Finally, let the province more and more 
seek its own adornment. Here I speak of a 
matter that in all our American communities 
has been until recently far too much neg- 
lected. Local pride ought above all to cen- 
tre, so far as its material objects are con- 
cerned, about the determination to give the sur- 
roundings of the community nobility, dignity, 
})eauty. We Americans spend far too much 
of our early strength and time in our newer 
communities upon injuring our landscapes, 
and far too little upon endeavoring to beautify 
our towns and cities. We have begun to 
change all that, and while I have no right to 
speak as an aesthetic judge concerning the 

107 



PROVINCIALISM 

growth of the love of the beautiful in our 
country, I can strongly insist that no com- 
munity can think any creation of genuine 
beauty and dignity in its public buildings or 
in the surroundings of its towns and cities 
too good a thing for its own deserts. For we 
deserve what in such realms we can learn 
how to create or to enjoy, or to make sacri- 
fices for. And no provincialism will become 
dangerously narrow so long as it is constantly 
accompanied by a willingness to sacrifice 
much in order to put in the form of great 
institutions, of noble architecture, and of beau- 
tiful surroundings an expression of the worth 
that the community attaches to its own ideals. 



108 



Ill 

ON CERTAIN LIMITATIONS OF THE THOUGHT- 
FUL PUBLIC IN AMERICA 



Ill 



ON CERTAIN LIMITATIONS OF THE THOUGHT- 
FUL PUBLIC IN AMERICA^ 

1^0 one who is engaged in any part of the 
work of the higher education in this coun- 
try can doubt that, at the present time, our 
thouglitful public, — the great company of those 
who read, reflect, and aspire, — is a larger factor 
in our national life than ever before. When 
foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for 
gain, and of practical materialism, they fail 
to see how largely we are a nation of idealists. 
Yet that we are such a nation is something 
constantly brought to the attention of those 
whose calling requires them to observe any 
of the tendencies prevalent in our recent in- 
tellectual life in America. 

I 

When I speak, in this way, of contemporary 
American idealists, I do not now specially refer 
^ An address first delivered at Vassar College. 
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LIMITATIONS OF THE PUBLIC 

to the holders of any philosophical opinions, or 
even to the representatives of any one type of 
religious faith. I here use the term in no techni- 
cal sense. In this discussion, I mean by the 
word " idealist," a man or woman who is 
consciously and predominantly guided, in the 
purposes and in the great choices of life, by 
large ideals, such as admit of no merely mate- 
rial embodiment, and such as contemplate 
no merely private and personal satisfaction 
as their goal. In this untechnical sense the 
Puritans were idealists. The signers of our 
Declaration of Independence were idealists. 
Idealism inspired us during our Civil War. 
Idealism has expressed itself in the rich 
differentiation of our national religious life. 
Idealism has founded our colleges and univer- 
sities. 

Well, using the term " idealism " in this con- 
fessedly untechnical sense, I say that many 
of our foreign judges have failed to see how 
largely we Americans are to-day a nation of 
idealists. To be sure, we are by no means 
alone amongst modern men in our idealism. 

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But elsewhere sometimes the consequences 
of long-continued and oppressive militarism, 
sometimes the stress of certain social problems, 
and sometimes the burdens of ancient imperial 
responsibility, have tended more to discour- 
age, or even quite to subdue, many forms of that 
fidelity to ideals upon which surely all higher 
cvilization in any country depends. But, 
with us, ever since the close of the Civil War, 
numerous forces have been at work to render 
us as a nation more thoughtful, more aspiring, 
and more in love with the immaterial things 
of the spirit, and that too even at the very 
moment when our material prosperity, with 
all of its well-known corrupting temptations, 
has given us much opportunity, had we 
chosen to take it, to be what the mistaken 
foreign critics often suppose us to be, — a 
people really sunk in practical materialism. 

Moreover, in saying all this, as to our 
general growth in spiritual interests, I am not 
at all unmindful of that other side, — that 
grosser material side of our national life, 
upon which our foreign critics so often insist. 
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The growth of unwise luxury, the brute power 
of ill-used wealth, the unideal aspects of our 
political life, the evils of our great cities, — 
what enlightened American is there who does 
not recognize the magnitude of such ills in 
our midst ? But you cannot prove the absence 
of light merely by exploring the darker 
chasms and caverns of our national existence. 
Vast as are those recesses of night, the light 
of large and inspiring ideas shines upon still 
vaster regions of our x\merican life. Side 
by side with the excesses of mere luxury 
you find, amongst our people, a true and in- 
creasing, a self-sacrificing and intelligent love 
of the beautiful for its own sake. Side by 
side with the misuse of money, you observe 
the encouraging frequency of the great and 
humane deeds that wealth can do. Nor is 
this all. An ardent and often successful 
struggle for social reform, and a civic pride 
that aims, sometimes even from the very depths 
of municipal degradation, at the accom- 
plishment of great and honorable public 
services, — these are tendencies that are grow- 

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ing amongst us, and that are never wholly or 
permanently checked even by the closest 
contact with the very worst of our national 
defects. 

Yet, of course, the real proof of the prevalence 
of what I have called idealism, in the great 
masses of our people, is above all to be sought 
not in any particular good deeds of wealthy 
men, nor yet in the public life of the great 
cities, but in the intellectual and religious life 
of the community at large. And here it is, 
as I say, that the college teacher, or any other 
worker professionally concerned with the 
higher mental interests of our people, has a 
chance to estimate the strength and magni- 
tude of these interests in the unseen. 

In our country it is extraordinarily easy, 
and as one may at once admit it is too easy, 
to get a hearing for any seemingly new and 
large-minded doctrine relating either to so- 
cial reform or to inspiring changes of creed. 
Whoever desires the reputation of the founder 
of a new sect has merely to insist upon his 
plan for reforming society and saving souls, — 

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has merely to announce repeatedly to the 
public the high valuation that he sets upon his 
own ideas concerning nobler topics in order 
to win a respectful hearing from many, and, 
if his ideas have any measure of coherence and 
of humanitarian interest, an often all too 
kindly acquiescence from at least a few. 
And the faithfulness of these few may soon 
assume the pathetic intensity that so often 
marks the devotion of the followers of small 
sects. Need I mention many instances in 
order to remind you of the nature of these 
now so familiar processes in our American 
life.? The late Mr. Henry George was, up 
to the time of the appearance of his *' Progress 
and Poverty," a man quite unknown to the 
nation at large, — a California newspaper 
man, with no obvious authority to teach con- 
cerning economic problems. His book re- 
ceived, at the time of its appearance, little or 
no support from the professional economists, 
and excited at first, I believe, little very 
close attention from their side. George him- 
self was no party manager. He used hardly 

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any showy devices for attracting popular 
attention. He was simply in earnest. Yet we 
all know how the sect of his followers grew. 
And any busy man who has sometimes re- 
ceived letters from propagandists of that 
particular sect will also know, I suppose, 
how humane, how faithful, how strenuous, 
how unworldly, and one may add, how 
unweariedly obstinate they may be in their 
efforts to convert the doubter and to lead 
people to see, and if possible to love, their new 
way of social salvation. A similar, and even 
more swiftly contagious kindliness made pos- 
sible the dramatic, if temporary, success of Mr. 
Bellamy's book, " Looking Backward." And 
again, a case in point is the movement in con- 
nection with wdiich Bryan gained his first 
national prominence in 1896, a movement 
which came near proving successful, and which 
was then for a time so dangerous. That 
movement had its origin quite as much in 
{)ractical idealism as in material distress. 
Its fundamental motives were in considerable 
measure philanthropic, humane, and, in an 

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abstract way, vaguely large-minded. That 
was precisely what made this movement most 
dangerous. Unwise philanthropy, uninstructed 
large-mindedness, can often prove injurious 
to the very interests they seek to further. 
Our greatest national danger now lies in an 
extravagant love of ideally fascinating enter- 
prises, whose practical results are as hard to 
foresee and to estimate as was the end that 
lay before the noble-hearted Childe Rolande 
of Browning's well-known poem, when he 
searched for the goal of his journey in the 
midst of the shifting landscapes, and the 
treacherous pathways of his romantic wilder- 
ness. 

Well, these, I say, are instances of our 
American idealism in social matters. In re- 
ligion, a similar tendency has been strong in 
our life from the very first. It has not only 
multiplied sects among us, but it has also 
wrought great good by giving lasting strength 
to their missionary and to their other phil- 
anthropic enterprises. Moreover it has en- 
dowed them with an importance for the daily 

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life of the people that no established State 
church could ever have won by a merely ex- 
ternal show of authority. The same interest 
in ideals has kept the sects themselves from 
stagnation, has insisted upon an adjustment of 
whatever in their fashions of teaching was 
non-essential to the vital needs of each gen- 
eration of people. On the other hand, this 
idealism often shows itself less worthily in the 
form of a hasty desire for whatever seems new, 
or remote, or fantastic in faith. At the present 
day there is hardly a conceivable creed about 
ultimate matters, be it never so quaint or so 
unreasonable that, if its apparent intents are 
only humane, and its catch words impressive, 
this creed once earnestly taught cannot very 
quickly find a body of adherents, not only in 
our country at large, but in some of the most 
tlioughtful and sophisticated communities 
which our country contains. It is not the 
ignorant amongst us who are the prey of 
strange new doctrines, so much as a portion 
of the most considerate classes of our public. 
And we are indeed not ol^ligq^ to be big- 

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oted in order to feel that, at present, this 
spiritual plasticity of our American public 
has gone too far. We ought to be docile; 
but the disposition to prove all things can 
easily outrun the power to hold fast that 
which is good. 

As a consequence, if new sects thus easily 
find followers, and often faithful and per- 
manent followers, there is also the other side 
of the picture. There are those of our people 
who waste life in merely floating from doctrine 
to doctrine. In such minds the art of holding 
fast has wholly been lost, in favor of the easier 
art of at least playing with all the things that 
belong in the realms of the spirit. For such 
souls, new doctrines are like new pictures, or 
new plays, or like the passing events of a social 
season. The more ardent amongst such 
people grow temporarily enthusiastic upon 
every new occasion where they listen to what 
they cannot comprehend. The more dis- 
illusioned find the novelties in doctrine . more 
or less of a bore, just as some folk always 
find the plays and the parties tedious. But 

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both the ardent and the disillusioned, in such 
social groups as I now have in mind, do indeed 
treat the new doctrines and the various rival 
plans of salvation altogether too much as they 
treat the social occasions, the plays, or the 
pictures. They expect something new to take 
the place of the old at each moment of their 
experience. And whether ardent or bored 
they continue their life-long quest for spiritual 
sensations. 

Such excesses of the higher life in our 
country are only too easy to observe and, 
upon occasion, to ridicule. I have not men- 
tioned them however for the sake of ridicule. 
Spinoza said that human affairs are neither 
to be wept over nor to be laughed at, but to be 
understood; and Spinoza's word, despite its 
seeming fatalism, had from any point of view 
its large measure of truth. I am speaking 
at present of symptoms. These symptoms, 
like other incidents of so complex a life as 
ours, have both their good and their evil 
aspects. Devotion to ideals has its dangers 
as it has its glories. I have to point out the 

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one as an aid toward a comprehension of the 
other. 

I turn to still other and better aspects of 
the tendency here in question. If one asks 
what the devotion to ideals has of late accom- 
plished with purest success in the intellectual 
life of our country, I myself should be disposed 
to name, as one of the noblest, most positive, 
and most unsullied products of American 
idealism in recent years, the whole modern 
educational movement. The reform of aca- 
demic methods and interests, both in the 
younger and in the older universities and 
colleges has been such, within the past twenty- 
five years, as to constitute one of the most 
substantial and significant events in our 
national history. The general public still 
understands all too little of the vast work 
that has been accomplished. By the fault 
of too large a portion of the newspaper press 
of the country the more trivial aspects of our 
academic life, — the public athletic contests, 
and the idle gossip of the hour, — are continually 
exaggerated, while the serious and the most 

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progressive tendencies of this same life are as 
persistently slighted and are often misrepre- 
sented. Yet despite the false perspective 
in which our colleges are thus often made to 
appear, the general public has nevertheless 
somehow learned to support nobly the inter- 
ests of academic reform. The vast sums that 
have been dedicated to the cause of learning, 
the cordial approval that our more enlightened 
people have given to the attempts at bettering 
higher education, — these have been most 
encouraging features of our educational move- 
ment. Nor has this movement confined itself 
to the Universities and Colleges. In its 
connection with the lower schools it is still 
in the period of storm and stress and hope. 
But it is indeed, in all its forms, a movement 
in the interest of ideals. It has needed at 
every step great sacrifices, strenuous devotion, 
wide sympathies, and far-reaching foresight. 
And these have been forthcoming. When 
an intelligent American wants to vindicate the 
honor of his country to foreigners, I know 
in our recent history of no purer instance of 

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single-hearted patriotism, devoted to humane 
and unsullied ideals, and successful against 
all sorts of foes, not only without but within, — 
I know, I say, of no purer instance of such 
true patriotism than is furnished by just 
the great educational reform movement, 
and especially the academic movement of 
the last quarter of a century. For this has 
indeed been no mere effort of dreamers. It 
has been a practical movement. It has been 
guided by administrators who were often of 
the highest executive talent, — men quite 
capable, in many instances, of winning worldly 
success in wholly different and more showy 
regions of public life. It has been supported 
by benefactors who were often tempted by all 
sorts of more selfish interests to use their 
wealth otherwise. It has given to great 
numbers of youth a light and guidance that 
have meant for them escape from spiritual 
bondage, and an opportunity to become in 
their turn benefactors. It has furnished to 
our country a constantly increasing class of 
cultivated workers, ready to enter practical 

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life with the ardor of a genuine idealism in 
their hearts and minds. And great as this 
academic movement has been, its influence is 
only beginning. Its real fruits are still to be 
gathered. 

So far, then, I have surveyed a number 
of forms of recent American idealism. I have 
meant to be fair to both sides of the shield. 
Not all golden is our devotion to ideals. Yet 
this devotion is too marked a feature of our 
national spirit to justify the neglect of those 
among our foreign critics who regard us as 
mainly workers for wealth, or as lovers of 
mere material power. It may not be un- 
fitting, upon this occasion, for us to ask our- 
selves what can yet be done to make our na- 
tional idealism more intelligent, better or- 
ganized, and, above all, more effective. 

II 

For, after all that we have thus far said, 
when we try to sum up the amount of influence 
exerted by these various forms of idealism 
upon the actual life of our country, we are 

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obliged to confess that our thoughtful public 
is not yet as efficacious as it ought to be. 
Too frequently we find the lovers of the ideal 
engaged in unprofitable conflicts with their 
spiritual kindred. Plan wars with plan; re- 
form stands in hostile array over against 
reform. Meanwhile the children of this world 
are wiser in their generation than the children 
of light. The people who dwell in the realms 
of thought and of higher faith consequently 
find themselves unable to organize effectively 
their reforms. They indeed associate, dis- 
course, and take counsel together. But their 
enemies remain too often the better managers. 
While, as I just said, the academic movement 
is the great instance amongst us, in recent 
times, of the possible practical success of 
ideal interests, this educational progress 
stands too much alone. Our tree of life 
flourishes, and puts forth countless leaves; 
but it does not yet bear sufficient fruit for the 
healing of the nation. Our national idealism 
is more characteristic of our intellectual and 
religious life than it is productive of per- 

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manent, organized, and substantial results. 
Whenever the servants of ill perfect their 
devices for corrupting anywhere the state, 
and misusing its resources, the lovers of good 
things find themselves too frequently helpless 
to thwart such mischief. Yet amongst us 
the conscious servants of ill are really in a 
very decided minority. Our youth are ex- 
ceptionally high-minded and aspiring. Our 
social life is full of admirable purposes. Our 
people are very generally interested in the 
things of the spirit. Yet the enemy seems 
to have possession of far too many of the 
effective weapons of social and of political 
warfare. When we try to meet him in the 
field, we are too scattered, too fantastic, or 
too uncertain in mind, to be ready for an 
effective fight. Our thoughtfulness involves 
too much idle curiosity, too much vaguely 
restless ardor, too much unwillingness to 
accept the necessary material limitations under 
which human work is to be done. And there- 
fore we are indeed often, in practical under- 
takings, "beaten down" like Tennyson's 

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Lancelot in his quest for the Grail, '* beaten 
down by little men, mean knights." The 
enemy, the power of evil at work, in whatever 
form in our land, — the enemy at least always 
knows his own purpose. But we, we lovers 
of the ideal, spend far too much of our time 
vaguely wandering from one club-meeting or 
lecture or recent book to another, trying to 
discover just what it is that we are thinking 
about. While we, with eager minds, in- 
quire into the shifting thing sometimes called 
the New Thought, the enemy is steadily 
engaged in serving the purposes of the Old 
Adam. And those purposes need no course 
of lectures to define them, no laborious clam- 
bering toward any " higher plane " to survey 
them. The devil within is always ready to 
explain them directly and personally to all 
comers. The consequence is precisely that 
appearance of grosser materialism which our 
foreign critics falsely take to be characteris- 
tic of our country. But much more character- 
istic of us is the intensity, the manifoldness, 
the restlessness, and in all but a few regions, 

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the relative ineffectiveness of our national 
idealism. 

Look where you will, even in the regions 
where ideas best and most beneficently ex- 
press themselves in our social life, and you 
find the same limitations of our thoughtful 
public exemplified, setting bounds to our 
spiritual progress even in the best regions of 
our activity, and resulting in too many cases, 
in a more or less complete inability to do 
wholesome reforming work where work is most 
needed. In speaking thus, I have in mind no 
one section of our country, no one type of activ- 
ity, no one special class of our thoughtful public. 
As myself a Californian, and as one often 
called upon to visit, in connection with pro- 
fessional duties, very various parts of our land, 
I have felt the limitations of which I speak 
in the West as well as in the East, amongst 
good men and women, in the life of the pro- 
fessional classes as well as in the life of the 
people of the world. 

Wherever you go, you find the typical 
American sensitive to ideas, curious about 

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doctrines, concerned for his soul's salvation, 
still more concerned for the higher welfare of 
his children, willing to hear about great 
topics, dissatisfied with merely material ob- 
jects, seeking even wealth rather with a view 
to its more ideal uses than with a mere desire 
for its sensuous gratifications, disposed to 
plan great things for his country and for his 
community, proud of both, jealous of their 
honor, and discontented with the life that now 
is. His piety has its ideal fervor none the 
less when it is the piety of the free thinker 
than when it is that of the faithful. He 
forms and supports great associations for 
public-spirited ends. He encourages science 
and learning. He pauses in the midst of the 
rush of business to discuss religion, or educa- 
tion, or psychical research, or mental healing, 
or socialism. His well-known and character- 
istic devotion to his children keeps fresh in his 
heart a childlike love of plans and hopes and 
beliefs that belong not so much to the market- 
place, as to the far-off future, and to the home 
land of the Platonic ideas. 

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Yet this same American is unable to give 
his idealism any adequate expression in his 
social life. His country towns and his manu- 
facturing cities are too often full of hideous 
ugliness. Even the best of his great cities 
are in appearance whatever they happen to 
be. In founding new cities and in occupying 
new lands he first devotes himself to burning 
the forests, to levelling with ruthless eagerness 
the hill-slopes, to inflicting upon the land, 
whatever its topography, the unvarying plan 
of his system of straight streets and of rec- 
tangular street crossings. In brief, he begins 
his new settlements by a feverish endeavor 
to ruin the landscape. Now all this he does 
not at all because he is a mere materialist 
but (as a colleague of mine, Professor George 
Palmer, has pointed out), he does this be- 
cause mere nature is, as such, vaguely unsatis- 
factory to his soul, because what is merely 
found must never content us, and because our 
present life itself is felt to be not yet ideal. 
Hence, the first desire is to change, to disturb, 
to bring the new with us. 

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In the regions thus so quickly altered by 
man's hand, a community spirit, a strong 
local pride, quickly springs up. The church, 
the school, the university, appear within a very 
few years, and seem at first as if they were 
quite at home. One is firmly determined, in 
each young community, that they shall all be 
the best of their kind anywhere to be found. 
The social order thus established has also its 
representative literature, — its poets, its ar- 
tists, its public heroes, even its swiftly acquired 
local traditions, as well as its self-conscious 
social independence, somewhat too ardently 
and tremulously asserted, of the mere worn- 
out ideals and authority of the older regions 
of the country. 

Nor are the interests in ideal things confined 
to such expressions. Confident faith in the 
future and in the might of the new life as- 
serts itself in such newer regions of our land 
in the overhasty construction of great rail- 
ways, that pierce the mountains or invade the 
deserts, long before a less restlessly ideal 
people would have seen sufficient prospect of 

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any adequate return for the material outlay. 
Our pioneer makers of railways have often 
seemed as if they were themselves amongst 
the prophets, the poets, or even the fanatics 
of our newer communities. But the result of 
this eagerness is too often a swift bankruptcy. 
The young community flies too near the sun, 
and then lies prostrate and wingless in the 
despair of hard times. 

Hereupon begins the grosser period. The 
community soon really possesses through mere 
accumulation more wealth and power; yet 
merciless money-getters have profited by 
the failures of the first period, and these now 
take possession of the creations of the pioneers, 
crush out weaker opponents, obtain too much 
influence in local politics, and give to the life 
of the community just that outward seeming 
of mere materialism of which we have spoken. 
And now the better men learn more thought- 
fully to look about them, only to observe, at 
this stage, what vast opportunities have been 
lost, what noble natural beauties have been 
hopelessly defaced, what ideal kingdoms have 

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been carelessly created only to be conquered 
by the enemy. 

The real struggle with evil herewith begins. 
The social order, so hastily and easily organized 
at the outset, through the finely ideal political 
instincts of our people, now becomes infected 
by various political diseases. Corruption 
grows too prominent in politics. The Philis- 
tines seem to have captured and blinded the 
Sampson whose deeds made the pioneer days 
so wonderful. Satan seems to have tri- 
umphed. 

Yet this triumph is never so real as it seems. 
The good are still in the majority. The heart 
of society is still healthy. The church, the 
school, the university, the public library, the 
literary circles, the intellectual clubs, — these 
not only remain, but multiply, and in these one 
finds centres for the propagation of ideal 
interests. Would-be reformers become numer- 
ous. But alas, they war among themselves. 
They are too often crude, strident, prejudiced. 
Greed too often wins possession of the strong- 
est material forces of the community. The 

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reformers lift their too familiar voices in vain. 
The prophets true and false speak their 
many words. Many listen and applaud. Yet 
at the elections the prophets do not win. The 
thoughtful public remains the most char- 
acteristic, but too often the least effective, 
portion of the community. 

Such is the tale of too many of our newer 
communities. Shall I speak still of the older 
communities ? There indeed the processes 
are more complex; but the lesson, like the 
outcome, is too often the same. The great 
limitation of our thoughtful public in America 
remains its inability to take sufficient control 
of affairs. And in pointing out this limitation, 
I have already indicated, in a measure, both 
its causes and the directions in which we ought 
to look for a cure, if a cure is possible, for this 
ineffectiveness of our American idealism. Let 
me pass then to a closer study of this latter 
aspect of the case. I have not undertaken 
this discussion for the sake of merely criti- 
cising my brethren ; but for the sake of sug- 
gesting some few ways of improving our 

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state, in so far as any poor suggestions of mine 
can hope to possess value. 

Ill 

Yet, as I go on to this side of our topic, 
i must indeed admit quite freely that I have 
no panacea, no quack remedy to suggest, as 
any infallible cure for the ineffectiveness of 
our national idealism, or as any one saving 
device for overcoming the limitations of 
our thoughtful public. Such ills as the one 
here in question always lie deep in the very 
constitution of our temperaments. ^Ye can- 
not, by merely taking thought, add a cubit 
to our stature. One of the very limitations 
of our thoughtful public which are here under 
discussion lies in the fact that many of us 
suppose great reforms to be possible merely 
through good resolutions. Yet good resolu- 
tions have their place in accomplishing re- 
forms. Our mere human consciousness never 
by itself transforms our temperaments ; but 
it may do something toward lessening their 
ill effects, and toward intensifying or en- 

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larging the range of their good (jualities. 
Where limitations have to be overcome, a due 
measure of consciousness as to where the 
fault lies does not come amiss. Accordingly, 
with a full sense of the little that I can do by 
such mere practical advice as lies within my 
scope, I still wish not merely to point out the 
ailment, but to show how it may be attacked. 
That it is no hopeless ailment, such successes 
of our idealism as the modern educational 
movement have already shown us. May we 
not hope to escape in time and at last, in a 
measure from the ineffectiveness that now 
besets the efforts of the thoughtful people of 
our country ? 

Reform, in such matters, must come, if at 
all, from within. The kingdom of heaven is 
within you; and that truth is precisely what 
all ideally minded people know. It is this 
knowledge which makes them lovers of the 
unseen. I cannot then offer any ])edagogical 
device for raising the thoughtful public of our 
country to a higher level of effectiveness, unless 
my device appeals directly to the individual. 

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The public as a whole is whatever the pro- 
cesses that occur, for good or for evil, in in- 
dividual minds, may determine. No one of 
us is individually called upon for any very 
large share in determining other peoples' lives. 
The work of any one man, in this life, has a 
narrow range. Yet, on the other hand, the 
forest is made of the trees; and great reforms 
are due to the combined action of numerous 
individuals. 

I appeal then to the individual lover 
of ideals. I say, upon such as you are, 
and upon such as you aspire to be, the future 
of our country depends. If you fail, in union 
with your spiritual kind, to win, and to win 
for good, the controlling voice in the nation's 
affairs, corruption, grossness, despotism, social 
ruin, will sooner or later make naught of our 
liberties, of all the dear memory of our country's 
fathers, and of the great work that we in 
America ought to do for mankind. And if such 
as you are find not the way to overcome, in 
time, these present limitations of the effective- 
ness of our thoughtful public, you will fail 

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to win and to retain control of the constantly 
increasing complications of our national life. 
Our ideals will grow vaguer and more rest- 
less, even while our material activities become 
more steadily enchained by the powers of 
evil. We shall end where others have ended, 
in national disaster, in social dissolution, in 
humiliation, in the clutches of some domestic 
or foreign conqueror. 

But in case you win effective control over 
your personal ideals and over your own pro- 
cesses of giving them expression, you your- 
self as an individual will indeed accomplish 
but an infinitesimal portion of the nation's 
vast task. Yet still it will be the nation's 
task in which, in your measure, you will be 
engaged. For no man liveth unto himself, 
and no man dieth unto himself. I appeal 
then to you, and to the public, only through 
such as you are. If you, together with the 
others who love the coming of the kingdom 
of heaven, succeed in solving your personal 
problems, the good cause will win in public 
as in private. And what you need to find is 

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some little task that you can effectually do. 
That task you need to perform. 

To the individual, then, I address myself. 
Nor do I forget that I am speaking to students 
who already know what one means by high 
ideals, and by hearty aspirations, and who 
stand at the beginnins: of life's jrreat tasks. 
There comes a sad time in many lives, when 
people who have long struggled in vain with 
foes without and foes within, grow weary of 
the cultivation of ideal interests. Those to 
whom I am especially privileged to speak, 
UJ10I1 this occasion, have not reached this stage. 
I hope that when any of you reach it, you will 
pass it successfully, for nothing better have we 
in this life than our ideals and our hopes, and 
our power to do a little work. Just now you 
are privileged to have a faith, still unsullied, 
in such ideals, and a hope to do good work. 
I want to indicate some of the ways in which 
one may wisely nourish this faith, and under- 
take this work. 



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IV 

My first word of advice, addressed thus 
especially to the thoughtful amongst us, 
relates to a certain moderation, to a certain 
temperance, that, as I believe, we must all 
cultivate in dealing with our own conscious- 
ness of what our ideals are. Devotion to 
what we believe to be a high cause demands 
of us, indeed, a certain thoroughness of sur- 
render, a certain persistence in service, which, 
in its own due time and place, ought to know 
indeed no bounds. On the other hand, when 
thoughtful people cultivate ideals, they do so, 
in part, by thinking over these ideals, by 
reasoning about them, by becoming conscious 
of what they are, by trying to convert others 
to these ideals, and, in general, by giving these 
ideals articulate expression. The faithfulness 
of the unlearned may be dumb, half-conscious, 
incapable of giving any reason for itself. The 
fidelity of the thoughtful seeks definite formu- 
lation in a creed, propagates its cause by 
spoken and by written words, voices itself in 

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a doctrine that can be defended or assailed 
by argument, — in brief, seeks to add knowl- 
edge to faith, insight to service, and teaching 
to example. You often hear how important 
it is to be not only devoted, but wise, clear of 
head as well as persistent in service. Now 
such tendencies are an important factor in 
the lives of all thoughtful people. Their 
highest expression is a reasoned philosophy, 
which undertakes to investigate, to compare, 
to harmonize, and then, finally, to formulate 
and to teach systems of ideals. Now I am 
myself by calling a teacher of philosophy. 
I believe in persistent thoughtfulness as a 
most important factor in the higher life of 
humanity. I try to become as conscious as 
I properly can become of what my ideals are, 
and of why I hold them, and of how they go 
together to make one whole, and of why other 
lovers of reason ought, if I am right, to accept 
my ideals. Over against the inconsiderate 
partisans of this or of that form of unreason- 
ing faith, I often have, as teacher of philosophy, 
to maintain the importance, for certain great 

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purposes, of giving a reason for the faith that 
is in us. And so, as you see, I am in every 
way disposed to favor, in its place, not only 
the thoughtful spirit of inquiry, but the dis- 
position to formulate ideals in a definite and 
conscious way, to maintain them through 
argument, and to propagate them by the 
spoken and by the written word. I believe 
in the human reason, as a vastly important 
factor in the development of all our ideals. 

And yet, — I can here speak all the more 
frankly just because my profession is that of the 
reasoner, — I constantly see mischief done 
by an unwise exaggeration of the tendency 
to reason, to argue, to trust to mere formulas, 
to seek for the all-solving word; in brief, to 
bring to consciousness what for a given 
individual ought to remain unconscious. 
Thoughtfulness is, for us in this life, like any 
other human power and privilege. It must 
be exercised with a proper moderation. 
Thought must indeed be free. But freedom 
means responsibility. Thought, in any in- 
dividual, must freely set limits to its own 

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finite task. And when the thoughtful lovers 
of ideals forget this fact, they may become 
mere wranglers, or doctrinaires, or pedants, 
or, on the other hand, in the end, through 
failure in thinking, they may become cynics. 
Now some may wonder that, as a teacher 
of philosophy, I should at once lay the first 
stress upon this defect of the lovers of ideals, 
as a defect so often attendant upon the pro- 
cesses of unhappy thinkers. Some may wonder 
that I first confess the errors of my own call- 
ing. Yet why should I not do so.^ What 
defects has one more occasion to observe 
than those which occur in the erring human 
effort to pursue his own calling.? If one 
loves his calling and believes in it, does he 
therefore ignore these defects.? Shall one 
make a business of the art of seeing clearly, 
and yet entirely ignore the imperfections 
that may naturally beset his own organ of 
vision ? 

Very well then, I first observe that many 
thoughtful lovers of ideals, many students, 
many reformers, many teachers, are too 

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much disposed to trust to constant argument, 
reasoning, or reflection, to keep them faithful 
to their own ideals, and to win others to these 
ideals. Or again, some lovers of the ideal, 
even when they profess not to argue, but to be 
followers of intuition, still in many cases are 
too fond of abstract formulas, of catch words 
or phrases. Such mistake fads for eternal 
truths. Now all such have not observed the 
inevitable limitations of the human thinking 
process in each individual mind. They do 
not observe that any one of us can think 
clearly and reflectively and can formulate 
exactly and successfully only in case we think 
with due moderation, and think during the 
time properly set apart for thought, trying to 
formulate only what we have more or less 
expert right to understand, and then devoting 
the rest of life to naivete and to relatively 
unreflective action. As a professional rea- 
soner, I have a profound contempt for de- 
liberate excesses in the work of reasoning; 
I personally try to avoid such excesses. 
As one busy with formulating theories, I 

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have a great hatred for the excessive use of 
forniulas. 

I remember well, from my student days, 
a pathetic incident that may illustrate the 
spirit in which I make this confession. While 
I was studying philosophy, one winter at 
Leipzig, I enjoyed many happy hours in com- 
pany with a musical friend of mine, an ad- 
vanced student at the Conservatory, who had 
devoted himself since childhood to the violin, 
and who has since won an important place in 
his profession. He often took me to attend 
the musical evenings at the Conservatory, and 
so helped me, as a mere listener, to enter the 
wondrous world of tones where he was making 
his home. But alas ! for the moment, my 
friend, although so faithful and advanced 
a student of music, was himself no public 
performer at the Conservatory evenings, al- 
though in previous years he had been a promi- 
nent and favorite student player. Over- 
work had given him, for the time, one of those 
well-known functional nervous troubles of 
coordination, or "occupation disorders"; 

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namely, in his case, a "violinist's arm." Neu- 
ralgic pains whenever he played had forced 
him to suspend his efforts. Prolonged rest 
for his arm was needed. My friend was 
perforce spending this year in the study of 
musical theory, and in other more general in- 
tellectual tasks relating to his art. Naturally 
this forced restraint was hard, and wounded 
ambition would often express itself; but 
still my friend was a man of general mental 
skill, who had therefore not a few resources 
in his distress. One evening we were to- 
gether at the Conservatory. Many students 
played. Among them my friend's principal 
contemporary and rival, a young violinist 
of no small skill, won abounding applause 
by a very brilliant performance. And my 
friend, sitting beside me with wounded wing, 
must merely listen ! It would have been more 
than human not to rebel a little. But my 
friend could at least remember that he himself 
had his own variety of mental occupations. 
He did remember this fact, yet he grieved 
inwardly and deeply. As we were walking 

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home he was silent for a time, and then his 
wrath at the chains that bound him burst 
forth. We spoke of the rival. We could 
not avoid the topic. "Confound that fel- 
low!" said my friend. "Confound that fel- 
low; he can't do anything but fiddle!" 

Well, I speak somewhat in my friend's 
general spirit, although I hope without any 
bitterness toward any particular rival student 
when I now say: "I am indeed not nearly 
as much of a reasoner as I desire to be. My 
skill in this art is far below my ambition. 
But, poor as I am, reasoning is indeed my own 
art. I love it. I prize it. I cultivate it. 
It is a great part of my life. And yet, — and 
yet I still insist, — let that reasoner, that 
thoughtful lover of ideals, that philosopher, 
if such there be, let him be confounded who 
cannot do anything but reason." And in 
the same way I say to you of the thoughtful 
public : Woe unto the man or woman who can 
do nothing but be thoughtful. 

Yet why do I thus warn you.^ Pedantry, 
it will be said, is a disease of professors and 

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of bookish men. The young, the ardent, 
and the general company of the faithful to 
ideals in our land, whatever their faults, 
are surely not pedants. An overcultivation 
of the merely abstract reason is not a be- 
setting sin of most people. I reply that 
there are many forms of pedantry; there are 
many grounds for being on one's guard 
against it. The misuse of the reasoning 
process enters the life of the thoughtful in 
more ways than one. The love of abstract 
formulas, of mere phrases, or of falsely sim- 
plified thoughtful processes is not confined to 
the professors. 

I remember once discussing with a young 
lady who was a college student of psychology, 
some points in the text-book of my honored 
colleague Professor William James. We spoke 
in particular of his wonderful chapter on 
Habit, so full, as some of you may know, 
not only of theoretical wisdom, but of whole- 
some practical advice about the formation 
and control of habits. I asked my young 
friend what she thought of this chapter. She 

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replied, with adorable naivete, that she had 
found this chapter full of advice which must 
be very valuable indeed "for the young men 
for whom it was intended." Well, my young 
friend had certainly observed part of the 
significance of Professor James's chapter; 
but she did not admit having observed that 
his comments upon Habit apply to us all, 
whether young men or not. And now, just 
so, I should be sorry to have my word about 
the misuse of reason and the false love of 
abstract formulas supposed to apply only to 
those philosophers, if such there be, for whom 
it was indeed also intended. The lesson is 
general, and human. Especially does it 
apply to all the thoughtful public of America. 
For this fault of a too abstract thought- 
fulness is committed, in substance, whenever 
people try to reform all the world, or even any 
great region of our complex lives, by insisting 
upon any one set of phrases, of human con- 
ceptions and words, which the individual him- 
self has found somehow dear to his own 
consciousness. Not merely the partisans of 

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technical reasoning, but the apostles of intui- 
tion, too, can commit our fault, whenever they 
trust in any mere abstraction. The people 
of one idea, the people to whom this or that 
single device for saving souls is alone important, 
the followers of fads, — these fall prey to this 
form of error. They mistake the power to 
define for the power to accomplish, the ab- 
straction for the life, the single thought for 
all the wealth of truth that our human world 
contains, the exercise of an individual reason 
for the whole task of reforming our nature. 
And does not our modern America, both in the 
East and in the West, really suffer too much, 
nowadays, from mere fads .'' What shall 
I do to be saved ? says the inquirer, — and 
the answer is, — " Practise this or that 
system of mind cure, whose teaching can be 
made clear in just so many lessons. Follow 
Delsarte, study your attitudes, or oratory, or 
some other formal accomplishment. Accept 
this or that doctrine of the New Thought." 
Now the people who cultivate ideals in this 
spirit often suppose themselves to be free 

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from the philosopher's overwrought love of 
the reason. "We follow," they say, "spiritual 
intuitions. We thus avoid abstractions and 
wrangling." "Yes," one may reply, "but 
you none the less are anxious for some all- 
embracing formula, some one saving principle 
that shall do all manner of work." Now the 
human mind, in its present form of conscious- 
ness, is simply incapable of formulating all 
its practical devices under any one simple 
rule. We have to learn both to work and to 
wait. We have to learn to obey as well as to 
formulate. What saves the world can never 
be any one man's formulated scheme. Rest- 
less search for the immediate presence of the 
ideal is often vain, like the pioneer idealism 
that burns the forests merely to see what 
they hide. Let the forests grow. They are 
better than the empty hillsides. Much of 
the best in human nature simply escapes our 
present definitions, is known only by its 
fruits, and prospers best in the forest shade of 
unconsciousness. But a thoughtful lover of 
ideals, whether a philosopher or not, is of 

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course thinking of something that he can 
formulate, — is trying to make his ideas con- 
scious, expHcit, teachable, and so abstract. 
Hence so much of his life's business as he best 
formulates is likely for that very reason to 
be narrow when compared with his whole 
human task and with his own best and deepest 
aims. We are primarily creatures of instinct; 
and instinct is not merely the part of us that 
allies us with the lower animals. The highest 
in us is also based upon instinct. And only 
a portion of your instincts can ever be formu- 
lated. You will be able in this life to tell 
what they mean in only a few instances. But 
your life's best work will depend upon all 
of your good instincts together. Hence a 
great part of your life's work will never become 
a matter of your own personal and private 
consciousness at all. It is one of the duties 
then of the thoughtful lover of ideals to 
know that he cannot turn into conscious 
thinking processes all of his ideal activities. 
Accordingly, he must indeed cultivate a wise 
naivete, and that alongside of his reflective 

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processes. That is why the companionship of 
children becomes the more useful to us the 
more thoughtful we are. They show us the 
beauty of unconsciousness, and help us to 
compensate for our tendency to abstraction by 
reminding us of what it is to live straight- 
forwardly. 

And now, I say, this rule of mine applies to 
the very lover of ideals whom I now chance 
to be addressing. We who teach philosophy 
are constantly receiving inquiries from people 
who seem not to know how little in human 
life can as yet be reduced to any abstractly 
stateable formulas at all. Teachers inquire 
as to the final and correct theory of the develop- 
ment of the human mind, as to the precise 
number of powers that the mind possesses, or 
as to the one secret of method in education. 
Newspapers or magazines call for popular 
discussions of the most serious and complex 
issues, as if these could finally be dealt with 
in any brief shape. A newspaper once asked 
me to contribute to a so-called symposium 
whose problem was to be this : What character- 

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istics will the ideal man of the future possess ? 
As 1 only knew about the ideal future man 
this, that when he comes, he will, as in him 
lies, adequately attend to his own business, 
1 felt unable to contribute anything original 
to the proposed discussion. The first condi- 
tion of knowing how to think about ideal 
subjects consists in being aware not only what 
can be profitably formulated at all, but when 
and for what purpose a given formulation 
is profitable. When I visit a convalescent 
friend who is beginning to feel joyous after a 
long illness, I do not in general discuss the 
problem of evil. When I too am to enjoy the 
company of my friend, I do not first undertake 
to inquire into the metaphysical problem as to 
whether my friend exists at all. And yet just 
such problems have their place in philosophy. 
Now just so, when I vote, since, as it chances, 
I am no expert in sociology or in economic 
problems, I generally have no really very 
good reason that I can formulate, in a conscious 
and philosophical way, why I vote just as I do. 
I vote largely on grounds of sympathy and of 

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instinct. I know better than to try to do other- 
wise. If I tried to formulate a political theory, 
it would be a very poor one ; for I have no 
scientific comprehension of politics, no philoso- 
phy adequate to directing my choice of parties. 
For my business is largely with other branches 
of philosophy. I am a member of one or 
two deliberative bodies, where I often hear 
lengthy debates upon complex practical ques- 
tions. The debates for a time instruct me; 
but later they often weary me, if they continue, 
without instructing me. When people ask 
me my reason for my own vote in such com- 
plex practical cases, or wonder why I am 
anxious for a vote to be reached, I often say 
that just because my profession is reasoning, 
I have learned to know some of the limits 
of the art, and to recognize that about some 
complex practical issues, after a certain point, 
it is vain to reason further, since only personal 
reactions, incapable of adequate reflective 
formulation, will decide. Hence I grow weary 
of the much speaking. I know that at such 
times I seem unreasonable; but I merely 

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want to vote; and more formulations will in 
such cases make me no wiser. 

People often say that men act upon con- 
scious reasoning processes, and women upon 
intuitions which they refuse to formulate. 
The assertion is, like most proverbial asser- 
tions, inadequate to the wealth of life's facts. 
Certainly women often enough act with a 
mysterious swiftness of unconscious wisdom. 
But so do many of the most effective men. 
I have, however, often observed that some 
educated women, some women who enter 
public life as reformers, and perhaps too many 
college-bred women, are nowadays troubled 
with an overfondness both for mere formu- 
las and for abstract arguments about com- 
plex practical issues that only a happy in- 
stinctive choice and wholesome sentiment 
can ever successfully decide so long as we 
remain what we are; namely, frail and ignorant 
human beings, who see through a glass darkly. 
The fault of being overfond of abstrac- 
tions, or of trying to formulate bad reasons 
for one's instinctive actions, does not char- 

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acterize the man of business or the successful 
executive. One does not meet this fault in 
the market-place. But just this fault does 
characterize some of our most cultivated and 
thoughtful people in this country. And 
among these people I find a good many 
intellectual women. 

What then is the happy medium.^ Shall 
I cease to think ? No, not so. Be thoughtful, 
reason out some of your ideals for yourself. 
Know something, and know that something 
well. Have the region where you have a right 
to mistrust your instincts, to be keenly and 
mercilessly critical, to question, to doubt, and 
to formulate, and then devotedly to maintain 
and to teach. But let that region be the little 
clearing in your life's forest, — the place 
where you see, and comprehend, and are at 
home. Let there be such a place. You need 
it. It may be art, or theology, or Greek, or 
administrative work, or politics, or philosophy, 
or domestic economy, or general business, 
wherein you find this your chosen intellectual 
dwelling. In that region be indeed the crea- 

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ture of hard-won insight, of clear conscious- 
ness, of definite thinking about what it is 
yours to know. There the formula is in order. 
There the ideal is won by your investigations, 
and defended by your arguments. I say, 
have such a region. We need those who know. 
In that region, believe only when you know 
why you believe. But remember, life is vast, 
and your little clearing is very small. In the 
rest of life, cultivate naivete, accept authority, 
dread fads, follow as faithfully as your in- 
stinct permits other lovers of the ideal who are 
here wiser than you, and be sure that though 
your head splits you will never think out all 
your problems, or formulate all your ideals 
so long as you are in this life. If this precept 
were followed in this country there would be 
more experts, and fewer popular crazes, 
more effective work done, and less time wasted 
in hopeless efforts at general reforms. De 
te fabula, I say to every studious soul who is 
disposed to be too thoughtful rather than 
wisely effective. Be in your devotion to effec- 
tive leaders relatively uncritical in many things, 

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in order to be thoughtfully knowing in some. 
Be childlike in much of life in order to become 
maturely wise in some things. 



If you are once aware of the vanity of 
trying to formulate everything, and to argue 
about all sorts of problems, you will not be 
tempted to pursue unwisely mere novelties 
of formulation for their own sake. I have 
spoken more than once of the feverish desire 
for new ideas in which our thoughtful public 
wastes much time. An entirely false inter- 
pretation of the doctrine of evolution has led 
some people to imagine that in any department 
of our lives, novelty as such must mean true 
progress toward the goal. Hence you con- 
stantly hear of the New Education, the 
New Psychology, the New Thought, the 
New Humanity, and whatever else can 
be adorned by the mere prefixing of this 
adjective. And yet people do not speak 
adoringly of the New Blizzard, or of the 

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New Weather in general. We all of us have 
a fondness, not altogether wise, for the 
so-called news of the day, quite apart from its 
meaning; and the newspapers daily verify 
for us the ancient fact that bad men lie and 
steal and murder. Such news, which alas 
is no news, but the ancient sorrow of our race, 
we do indeed greet with a certain keenness of 
interest which is neither altogether rational 
nor highly ideal. But still the lovers of the 
ideal do not in such cases suppose that some 
new form of burglary must, because of the 
fatal law of evolution, be higher in nature, or 
nobler, or more worthy of study than the older 
arts of the thieves. So nobody preaches in 
praise of the New Burglary. Nor do we 
suppose that evolution implies, as any univer- 
sal law, that the New Blizzard, when it comes, 
is an object worthy of admiration above all 
former caprices of our climate. We know 
that if news, in this sense, is indeed interesting, 
still the weather is the weather, and the thieves 
break through and steal, and that no news 
makes more ideal these ancient aspects of the 

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visible world. Now much that is proposed 
as new in thought, or in the less exact sciences, 
or in complex arts such as education, has 
indeed its importance as embodying real 
progress. When we know that to be the case, 
we welcome the new, not because it is merely 
new, but because it is a substantial addition 
to what is already known to be a good. But, 
on the other hand, much that is novel in opin- 
ion is novel only as the latest change of the 
weather is new. And I warn you, not indeed 
blindly to condemn, but cautiously to suspect 
doctrines that are obliged to advertise, very 
ostentatiously, the supposed fact that they are 
new, in order to get a public hearing. In 
really progressive sciences, as for instance in 
psychology itself, the most important advances 
need not be thus loudly heralded. They 
make their own way, not because they are 
merely new, but because they are maturely 
conceived and carefully worked out. As for 
the world of faith, it is as vain to be a mere 
seeker of novelties as it is to be a mere con- 
servative. In our deeper faiths the newest 

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and the oldest of humanity's deeds, interests, 
and experiences lie side by side. What is 
new for one soul is not new for another. 
Love and death and our duty, these are the 
oldest and the newest things in human destiny. 
The new love is not on that account the true 
one. The new coming of death teaches 
still the ancient lessons of the burial psalm. 
The new duty is no duty unless it is an example 
of the most venerable of truths. "These 
things" says Antigone, "are not of to-day or 
of yesterday, and no man knows whence they 
came." As a fact, what you and I really 
most need and desire is not the new, nor yet 
the old. It is the eternal. The genuine 
lover of truth is neither a conservative nor 
a radical. He is beyond that essentially 
trivial opposition. He cares nothing for the 
time in which these things came to pass. For 
him their interest lies in their truth. Time 
is but an image, an imitation of the eternal. 
Evolution itself is only a fashion in which the 
everlasting appears. For God there is noth- 
ing new. Before the mountains were brought 

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forth, or ever thou hadst founded the earth, 
from everlasting thou art God. 

Be docile then; be ready to learn what is 
new to you. But avoid this disease of merely 
running after every thought that loudly pro- 
claims, or every plan that stridently asserts, 
"Behold, I am new." Say to every such 
claimant for your reverence: "Are you such 
that you can grow old and still remain as good 
as ever.'^ Then indeed I will trust you." 

But is there nothing, then, in the idea of 
progress ? Are there not certainly progres- 
sive movements, whose new stages will there- 
fore be good ? Yes. The actual discoveries 
of empirical science, once submitted to careful 
test, do indeed form a progressive series. 
Here the new, once assured by critical veri- 
fication, is good. But the existence in any 
particular field of inquiry or of action of a 
progress that you and I can regard as certain, 
is never something to be merely presumed. 
The presumption is valid only after due 
examination. Only the expert can decide 
then, with clearness, whether the new is good. 

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This liolds in finance and in business as gen- 
uinely as in politics or in religion. Therefore 
it is only, once more, within the relatively 
narrow range of your expertness, that you can 
judge whether the new really is, as such, likely 
to be the good. Outside of that range, 
favor no novelties unless they appeal to your 
personal sentiments, to your most humane 
sympathies, to your best cultivated, but still 
in general partly unconscious, tastes and in- 
stincts. In brief, then, I say to our thoughtful 
public, overcome your limitations, first by 
minute and faithful study of a few things and 
by clearness of ideas about them; then by child- 
like simplicity in the rest of life, by faithfulness 
to enlightened leaders, by resignation as op- 
posed to restlessness, and above all by work 
rather than by idle curiosity. Organize 
through a willingness to recognize that we 
must often differ in insight, but that what we 
need is to do something together. Avoid this 
restless longing for mere novelty. Learn to 
wait, to believe in more than you see, and to 
love not what is old or new, but what is eternal. 

165 



IV 

TIIE PACIFIC COAST 

A reYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF 
CLIMATE AND CIVILIZATION 



IV 

THE PACIFIC COAST 

A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF 
CLIMATE * AND CIVILIZATION 

X HAVE been asked to describe some of 
the principal physical aspects of Cali- 
fornia, and to indicate the way in which they 
have been related to the life and civilization 
of the region. The task is at once, in its main 
outlines, comparatively simple, and in its 
most interesting details hopelessly complex. 
The topography of the Pacific slope, now well 
known to most travellers, is in certain of its 
principal features extremely easy to charac- 
terize. The broad landscapes, revealing very 
frequently at a glance the structure of wide 
regions, give one an impression that the mean- 
ing of the whole can easily be comprehended. 
Closer study shows how difficult it is to under- 
stand the relation of precisely such features 
to the life that has grown up in this region. 

' An addreas prepared for tho Xutional Geographical 
Society, in 1898. 

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THE PACIFIC COAST 

The principal interest of the task lies in the 
fact that it is our American character and 
civilization which have been already moulded 
in new ways by these novel aspects of the 
far western regions. But we stand at the 
beginning of a process which must continue 
for long ages. Any one interested in the unity 
of our national life, and in the guiding of our 
destinies by broad ideals, desires to conceive 
in some fashion how the physical features of 
the Pacific Coast may be expected to mould 
our national type. Yet thus far we have, as 
it were, only the most general indications of 
what the result must be. 

In endeavoring to distinguish between what 
has already resulted from physical conditions 
and what has been due to personal character, 
to deliberate choice, or to the general national 
temperament, or to what we may have to call 
pure accident, one is dealing with a task for 
which the data are not yet sufficient. We 
can but make a beginning. 



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THE PACIFIC COAST 



The journey westward to California is even 
now, when one goes by rail, a dramatic series of 
incidents. From the wide plains of the states 
immediately west of the Mississippi one passes 
at first through richly fertile regions to the more 
and more arid prairies of the eastern slope 
of the Rocky Mountains. Then come either 
the steep ranges or the wide passes, and at last 
what used to be called the Great American Des- 
ert itself, that great interior basin of the rugged, 
saw-tooth ranges, where the weirdly dreary land- 
scape at once terrifies the observer by its deso- 
lation, and inspires him by the grandeur of its 
loneliness, and by the mysterious peacefulness 
of the desert wherein, as one at first feels, 
nothing like the complex and restless life of 
our eastern civilization will ever be possible. 

As one travels by the familiar central route 
still further west, one reaches the vallev of 
the Humboldt River, that kindly stream 
whose general westerly trend made the early 
overland migration possible. At the end of 

171 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

this portion of the route rises the vast wall of 
the Sierra Range, and the traveller's heart 
thrills with something of the strange feeling 
that the early immigrants described when, 
after their long toil, they reached the place 
where, just beyond this dark and deathlike 
wall, the land of heavenly promise was known 
to lie. Abrupt is the ascent of this great 
range; slower on the other side, the descent, 
amidst the magnificent canons of the western 
slope, to the plains of the Sacramento Valley. 
From the foot-hills of the Sierra one used to 
the journey could easily get at many points a 
wide outlook into the region beyond. The 
Coast Range in the far distance bounds with 
its blue summits the western view, and seems 
to hide the ocean for whose shore one already 
looks, as in childhood I, who then lived in the 
Sierra foot-hills, and had never seen the sea, 
used longingly to look. Through the valley 
beneath winds the Sacramento, fed by numer- 
ous tributaries from the Sierra. At length, as 
one continues the railway journey, one reaches 
the plains of the Sacramento Valley them- 

172 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

selves, and enters that interesting region 
where the scattered oaks, separated from 
one another by wide distances, used to seem, 
I remember in the old days, as if set out by 
God's hand at the creation in a sort of natural 
park. One crosses the valley, — the shore 
of San Francisco Bay is reached. If one is 
travelling in summer, the intensely dry heat 
of the Sacramento Valley suddenly gives place 
to the cold winds of the coast. Mist and the 
salt air of the sea greet you as you approach 
the rugged hills about the Golden Gate, and 
find your way by ferry to San Francisco. 

The region that to-day is so swiftly and so 
easily entered was of old the goal of an over- 
land tour that might easily last six months 
from the Missouri River, and that was attended 
with many often-recorded dangers. Yet the 
route that in this brief introductory statement 
we have followed, is nearly identical with the 
one which first guided the immigrants to the 
new land. And in part this route was identi- 
cal, namely, as far as Fort Ilall, with the once 
familiar Oregon Trail. 

173 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

II 

Oregon arjd California, the Canaan which 
long formed the only goal of those who trav- 
elled over these intermediate regions, are de- 
termined as to their characters and climate 
by the presence beyond them of the great 
ocean, and by the trend northward and 
southward of the elevated ranges of moun- 
tains which lie west of the central basin. On 
all the continents of the world, in the latitudes 
of the temperate zones, the countries that lie 
on the lee side of the ocean receive the world's 
prevailing winds tempered by a long course 
over the water. Accordingly, those coun- 
tries very generally enjoy a relatively steadier 
climate than those which lie in the same lati- 
tudes but on the lee side of tlie great conti- 
nental areas; that is, toward the east. But 
other influences join themselves, as secondary 
causes, in a number of cases, to this general 
consequence of the prevailing west winds of 
the temperate zones. The good fortune of 
Oregon and California as to their climate 

174 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

depends, in fact, as the meteorologists now 
recognize, partly upon the steadying influence 
of the vast masses of water that there lie to 
windward, partly upon the influence of the 
mountain masses themselves in affecting pre- 
cipitation, and finally upon certain great sea- 
sonal changes in the distribution of the more 
permanent areas of high and low pressure, — 
changes which have been elaborately studied 
in the report of Lieutenant Glassford on the 
climate of California and Nevada, published 
as a government document in 1891. 

During the summer months, the entire 
region west of the high Sierra Range and of its 
continuation, the Cascade Range, is com- 
paratively free, and in the southern portion 
almost wholly free, from storm disturbances. 
The moisture-laden winds of the ocean are 
then deflected by areas of high pressure, which 
persist off the coast, and the moister winds 
are prevented from coming into close relation 
to the mountains and discharging their mois- 
ture. On the other hand, during the months 
from November to INIarch, and in Oregon still 

175 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

later, storm areas are more frequent, and 
their behavior along the coast, by reason of 
certain areas of high pressure which are then 
established in the regions east of the Sierra, 
is rendered different from the behavior more 
characteristic of the well-known storms of our 
eastern coast. The resulting conditions are 
sometimes those of long-continued and de- 
cidedly steady precipitation on the Coast 
Range of California, and on the western slope 
of the Sierra, as well as throughout the Oregon 
region. Thus arise the longer rains of the 
California wet season. At other times in the 
rainy season the storm areas, moving back 
and forth in a more variable way along the 
coast, but still unable to pass the area of high 
pressure that lies farther inland, produce 
conditions of a more gently and variably 
showery sort over a wide extent of country; 
as the rainy season passes away in March 
and April, these showers grow less frequent 
in California, though they continue in Ore- 
gon much later. That portion of Oregon 
which lies east of the Cascade Range belongs, 

176 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

once more, to the decidedly dry regions of the 
western country; on the other hand, western 
Oregon has a much moister climate than 
California. 

In consequence, the climate, throughout 
this entire far western region, is character- 
ized by a very sharp distinction between the 
wet and dry seasons; while otherwise, within 
the area of Oregon and California, there exist 
very wide differences as to the total amount 
of annual precipitation. Wide extents of 
country, as, for instance, the San Joaquin Val- 
ley in California, have needed the develop- 
ment of elaborate methods of irrigation. The 
relative variability of rainfall in the more 
northern regions has in some years beset the 
Sacramento Valley with severe floods. And 
still farther north, at places on the Oregon and 
Washington coast, the annual precipitation 
reaches very high figures indeed. If one then 
returns to the other extreme, in far south- 
eastern California, one is altogether in a desert 
region. Normally the wet season of central 
and southern California, even where the rain- 
K 177 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

fall is considerable, is diversified by extended 
intervals of beautifully fair and mild weather. 
But nowhere on the Pacific Coast has the 
variation of seasons the characters customary 
in the eastern country. A true winter exists, 
indeed, in the high Sierra, but even here this 
season has a character very different from that 
of the New England winter. Enormous falls 
of snow on the upper Sierra slopes are, in- 
deed, frequent. But on the other hand, there 
are many places in the Sierra where an early 
spring very rapidly melts away these masses 
of snow from the upper foot-hills, and leads 
by a swift transition to the climate of the Cali- 
fornia dry season, in a dramatic fashion that 
happens to be prominent amongst my own 
childhood memories. 

In general, then, in California and Oregon, 
with the great western ocean so near, the rou- 
tine of the year's climate is much more definite 
and predetermined than in our Atlantic 
states. In western Oregon, where, as we have 
said, the climate is far more moist, the rains 
begin about the end of September and con- 

178 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

tinue with more or fewer intermissions until 
May or June. The dry season then lasts 
steadily for three or four months. In Cali- 
fornia the dry season grows longer, the rainy 
season less persistent and wealthy in watery 
gifts, the farther south we go, until in the 
far south, except on the coast, there is often 
a very short intermission in the year's drought. 
So much for the climate of this region as a 
whole. Meanwhile, there are numerous local 
varieties, and amongst these more distinctly 
local influences that modify the climate both 
in the wet and in the dry seasons, the Coast 
Range of California plays a very important 
part. This range, separated, as we have 
seen, from the Sierra by the Sacramento and 
San Joaquin valleys, joins its masses with 
those of the Sierra both at the northern end 
of the Sacramento Valley and at the southern 
extremity of the San Joaquin Valley. These 
two rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joa- 
(juin, flowing the one southward and the 
other northward, join their waters and find 
an exit to the sea through San Francisco Bay, 

179 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

which itself opens into the ocean through the 
Golden Gate. The Sacramento Valley is 
thus bounded on the east by a range that 
varies in height from seven thousand to four- 
teen thousand feet. The Coast Range on the 
west has an elevation varying from two thou- 
sand to four thousand, and in some cases 
rising to five thousand feet. The elevation of 
the Coast Range is thus sufl&cient to affect, 
in the rainy season, the precipitation in some 
localities, although the greatest rainfalls of 
the rainy season in California are due to the 
influence of the Sierra upon the moisture- 
laden winds of the sea during the passage of 
the areas of low pressure. But decidedly 
more marked is the influence of the Coast 
Range during the summer months, upon the 
determination of local climate along the 
northern Californian coast. Here the sum- 
mer, from Monterey northward, is along the 
coast decidedly cold, — sea-breezes and fre- 
quent mists marking the days of the entire 
dry season, while at night the winds usually 
fall, and the cold may not be so severely felt. 

180 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

But frequently only a few miles will separate 
these cold regions of the coast from the hot 
interior of the Sacramento Valley or from the 
smaller valleys on the eastern slope of the 
Coast Range. 

To sum up the total result of all these con- 
ditions, one may say that the main feature of 
the whole climate, apart from its mildness, is 
the relatively predictable character of the 
year's weather. In the dryer regions of the 
south, wherever irrigation is possible and has 
been developed, the agriculturist often feels a 
superiority to weather conditions which makes 
him rejoice in the very drought that might 
otherwise be regarded as so formidable. In 
central California one is sure, in advance, of 
the weather that will steadily prevail during 
all the summer months. Agricultural opera- 
tions are thus rendered definite by the knowl- 
edge of when the drought is coming, and by 
the freedom from all fear of sudden storms 
during the harvest season. 

That this climate is delightful to those who 
are used to its routine will be well known to 

181 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

most readers. That it is not without its dis- 
agreeable features is equally manifest to every 
tourist. Nor can one say that this far western 
country is free from decided variations in the 
fortunes of different years. Where irrigation 
is not developed, great anxiety is frequently 
felt with regard to the sufficiency of the annual 
rain supply of the rainy season. Years of 
relative flood and of relative drought are as 
well known here as elsewhere. Nor is one 
wholly free, within any one season, from un- 
expected and sometimes disagreeably long- 
continued periods of unseasonable tempera- 
ture. A high barometer over the region north 
and east of California occasionally brings to 
pass the well-known California "northers." 
These have, in the rainy season, a character 
that in some respects reminds one of the fa- 
miliar cold-wave phenomena of the east, 
although the effect is very much more moder- 
ate. Frosts may then extend throughout 
northern California, may beset the central 
Coast Range, and may on occasion extend 
far into the southern part of California itself. 

182 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

But when the "northers" come during the 
dry season, they are frequently intensely hot 
winds, whose drought, associated with hill or 
forest fires, may give rise to very memorable 
experiences. But these are the inevitable 
and minor vicissitudes of a climate which is, 
on the whole, remarkably steady, and which 
is never as trying as are the well-known varia- 
tions of our own northeastern climate. The 
generally good effect upon the health of such 
a climate is modified in certain cases by the 
possibly overstimulating character of the 
coast summer, which, as for instance at San 
Francisco, permits one to work without thought 
of holidays all the year round. In my own 
boyhood it used often to be said that there 
were busy men in San Francisco who had 
reached that place in 1849, and who had 
become prominent in mercantile or other 
city life, and who had never taken vacations, 
and never left San Francisco even to cross 
the bay, from the hour of their coming until 
that moment. Of course, such men can be 
found in almost any busy community, but 

183 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

these men seemed rather characteristic of the 
early CaHfornia days and suggested the way 
in which a favorable climate may on occasion 
be misused by an ambitious man to add to the 
strains otherwise incident to the life of a new 
country. 

If one now turns from the climate to the 
other aspects of our region, the general topog- 
raphy at once suggests marked features that 
must needs be of great importance to the entire 
life of any such country. California and Ore- 
gon are sharply sundered from one another 
by the ranges north of the Sacramento Valley. 
The Washington region, about Puget Sound, 
is destined to still a third and decidedly sepa- 
rate life, by reason of its relation to those mag- 
nificent inland waters, and by reason of the 
two high ranges which bound the shores of the 
American portion of Puget Sound. 

And, in fact, the country of the whole Pa- 
cific Coast may be regarded as geographically 
divided into at least four great regions: the 
Washington region, in the neighborhood of 
Puget Sound; the Oregon region with the 

184 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

valley of the Columbia; the northern and 
central California region, including the coast 
and bay of San Francisco, together with the 
great interior valley ; and, finally, the southern 
region of California. Both the social devel- 
opment and the material future of these four 
great sections of the Pacific Coast must 
always be mutually somewhat distinct and 
independent. The northern and central Cali- 
fornia region, the third of those just enumer- 
ated, is in possession of the largest harbor 
between Puget Sound and the southern boun- 
dary of the United States. It is, therefore, 
here that the civilization of the west was des- 
tined to find its first centre. Nor can this 
province ever have a social destiny indepen- 
dent of that of San Francisco itself. The 
southern California region, while not sepa- 
rated from central and northern California by 
any very high barrier, is still marked off by 
certain features due to the amount of precipi- 
tation, and to the smaller harbors of this part 
of the Pacific Coast. 

I have already mentioned more than once 
185 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

the breadth of landscape characteristic espe- 
cially of central California, but often visible 
elsewhere on the Pacific Coast. Here is a 
feature that has to do at once with the mate- 
rially important and with the topographically 
interesting features of this land. When you 
stand on Mount Diablo, a mountain about 
three thousand eight hundred feet high, and 
some fifteen miles east of San Francisco Bay, 
you look in one direction down upon the ocean 
and upon San Francisco Bay itself, while in 
the other direction you have in full sight the 
Sierra Range beyond the great valley, and vast 
reaches of the interior valley itself. Simi- 
larly, from the upper foot-hills of the Sierra, 
every chance elevation that overtops its neigh- 
bors a little gives you far-reaching views of 
the interior valley. The normally clear air 
of a great part of the year determines the 
character and sharp outlines of these broad 
views. The young Californian is thus early 
used to a country that, as it were, tells its 
principal secrets at a glance, and he some- 
times finds his eye pained and confused either 

186 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

by the monotonous landscapes of the prairies 
of our middle west, or by the baffling topog- 
raphy of many parts of New England or of 
our middle states, where one small valley at 
a time invites one to guess what may be its 
unseen relations to its neighbors. The effect 
of all this breadth and clearness of natural 
scenery on mental life cannot be doubted. 

in 

Of climate and topography this very sum- 
mary view must now suffice. We turn from 
nature toward life, and ask ourselves what 
bearing these geographical features have had 
upon the still so incomplete social develop- 
ment of California. 

In 1846, at the outset of our war with 
Mexico, the Mexican province of California 
extended toward the interior, at least on 
paper, so far as to include the present Nevada 
and Utah ; but only the California coast itself 
was really known to its inhabitants. Cali- 
fornia was seized by the American fleet at 
the outset of the war. Its value to our coun- 

187 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

try had been earlier made known partly 
through the New England traders who dealt 
on that coastj and partly through the appear- 
ance in the territory of American settlers. 
The famous report of the expedition of 1844 
made by Lieutenant Fremont brought to a 
focus the popular interest in the importance 
of the entire territory, and prepared the way 
for the excitement aroused by the discovery 
of gold in 1848. 

The gold excitement determined the entire 
future history of California; and here of 
course the immediate influence of the physical 
upon the social conditions is the best known 
fact about the state. The golden period of 
California may be regarded as filling all the 
years between 1848 and 1860. Or perhaps 
a still better dividing line might be made in 
the year 1866, when the government first sur- 
veyed the mineral lands of California and 
parted with its title to these lands, so that 
the conditions of mining ownership were 
thenceforth no longer primitive. Up to that 
time the miners of California had worked by 

188 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

government consent upon land to which 
they could acquire no title, so that their right 
to hold land was entirely due to miner's cus- 
tom and to occupation, both of which were 
recognized by the courts of the state in deal- 
ing with conflicts amongst miners. With 
the close of the distinctively mining period, 
begins the agricultural period of California. 
Gold raining has of course continued until 
the present day, but the development of agri- 
culture soon surpassed in importance that of 
all other industries in the state. 

Nevertheless, the civilization of the agri- 
cultural period has been of course deter- 
mined in large part, despite the change of 
material conditions, by the traditions of the 
more romantic golden period. The Cali- 
fornia pioneers are gradually passing away; 
but as the fathers and the early Puritans de- 
termined in many respects the future of New 
England, so the miners, together with their 
peers, the merchants of early San Francisco, 
lived a life whose traditions, directly due to 
the physical conditions under which they 

189 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

worked, are sure to be of long-continued, per- 
haps of permanently obvious, influence in 
the development of the civilization of Cali- 
fornia. 

If one attempts to describe in what way 
the civilization either of the golden days or 
of the later agricultural period has been af- 
fected by the geographical conditions, a stu- 
dent of my own habits and prejudices feels 
at once disposed to pass directly to the inner 
life of the Californian and to ask himself what 
influence the nature and climate of such a 
region seem to have upon the life of the indi- 
vidual mind and body, and, indirectly, upon 
the social order. Here of course one treads 
upon ground at once fascinating and enor- 
mously difficult. Generalization is limited 
by the fact of great varieties of personal char- 
acter and type with which we are dealing. 
But after all, I think that in California litera- 
ture, in the customary expressions of Cali- 
fornians in speaking to one another, and. to 
a very limited degree, in the inner conscious- 
ness of any one who has grown up in Cali- 

100 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

fornia, we have evidenee of eertain ways in 
which the conditions of such a region must 
influence the life and, I suppose in the end, 
the character of tlie whole community. I 
feel disposed, then, to try to suggest very 
briefly how it feels to grow up in such a cli- 
mate, to live in such a region, thus separated 
by wide stretches of country from other por- 
tions of our own land and from the world at 
large, thus led by the kindliness of nature 
into a somewhat intimate, even if uncompre- 
hended, relation to the physical conditions, 
and thus limited to certain horizons in one's 
experience. I speak of course as a native 
Californian, but I also do not venture to 
limit even for a moment my characterization 
by reference to my own private experience. 
Californians are rather extraordinarily con- 
scious of the relation between their home and 
their lives. Newcomers who have grown up 
elsewhere are constantly comparing their 
natural surroundings with those that they 
knew before. The natives, for reasons that 
I shall suggest in a moment, are put into a 

191 



THE TACIFIC COAST 

relation \Yith nature which, whether they are 
students of nature or not, and whether they 
are observant or not, is in feeling a peculiarly 
intimate relation. The consequence may, as 
I have already suggested, be best understood 
by a reference to some of the wealthy and 
varied literature that California has already 
produced. 

Every one is familiar with that reflection of 
the change of seasons in poetical literature 
which we find lirst in the classic English lit- 
erature, which we find again gradually ap- 
pearing in new forms in adaptation to the 
more special conditions of our American cli- 
mate. New England nature has now been 
perhaps almost too frequently characterized 
in literary art. We are here to ask how the 
nature of California comes to be character- 
ized. Let me appeal at once to some of the 
poets to tell us. 

The most familiar account of the California 
climate in literature is Bret Harte's charac- 
terization of the seasonal changes in his poem, 
"Concepcion Argiiello." The scene is here 

102 



TllK r.VC IFIC COAST 

at the Presidio at San Francisco, close by the 
Golden Gate, where the lieroine waited for 
her lover during the long years that the poem 
describes. 

** Day by day on wall and bastion lieat the hollow empty 

breeze — 
Day by day the sunlight glittered on the vacant, smiling seas; 
Week by week the near hills whitened in their dusty leather 

cloaks — 
Week by week the far hills darkened from the fringing 

plain of oaks; 
Till the rains came, and far-breaking, on the fierce south- 
wester tost. 
Dashed the whole long coast with color, and then vanished 

and were lost. 
So each year the seiisons shifted, wet and warm and drear 

and dry; 
Half a year of clouds and flowers — half a year of dust and 

sky." 

The nature which is thus depicted has of 
course many other aspects besides this its 
fundamental rhythm; but prominent in all 
the literary descriptions is the stress laid upon 
the coming of the rains, — an event which 
occupies, very naturally, the same place in 
o 193 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

the California poet's mind that the spring 
occupies elsewhere. Only what this spring- 
time breaks in upon in California is not in 
general cold, but drought. It is here not the 
bursting away of any iron barrier of frost, 
but the clearing of the hazy air, the introduc- 
tion of a rich and sudden new life, the re- 
moving of a dull and dry oppression from the 
heart, — it is such things that first come to 
mind when one views this change. A stu- 
dent of the University of California in the 
year 1878, a lady who has won success in more 
than one branch of literature, Miss Millicent 
Shinn, published in a college paper of that 
time the following sonnet, under the title of 
"Rain." The poem deserves to be recalled 
here, just as a suggestion of the relation 
between nature and the individual mind 
under such conditions : — 

" It chanced me once that many weary weeks 
I walked to daily work across a plain, 
Far-stretching, barren since the April rain; 
And now, in gravelly beds of vanished creeks, 
November walked dry shod. On every side 
194 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

Round the horizon hung a murky cloud, — 
No hills, no waters; and above that shroud 
A wan sky rested shadowless and wide. 
Until one night came down the earliest rain; 
And in the morning, lo, in fair array, 
Blue ranges crowned with snowy summits, lay 
All round about the fair transfigured plain. 

Oh, would that such a rain might melt away 

In tears the cloud that chokes my heart with pain." 

The heavy air of the close of the dry season, 
the weary waiting for the autumn rains, the 
quick change as the new hfe came, — all 
these things bring characteristically before 
one the nature life of central California, — a 
region of the half-arid type, where the con- 
ditions are far enough from true desert con- 
ditions, while at moments they simulate the 
latter. Yet not merely this fundamental 
rhythm of the climate so easily impressive to 
every sojourner, arouses the sensitive atten- 
tion of the life-long inhabitant. The dwellers 
by the shores of San Francisco Bay see these 
seasonal changes in the midst of a highly 
varied landscape. From the hill slopes on 
the eastern shores of that great harbor one 

195 



THE TACIFIC COAST 

looks toward the Golden Gate. North of 
the Gate rise the rugged heights of Mount 
Tamalpais, to a point about twenty-six hun- 
dred feet above the sea level. South of the 
Gate, San Francisco itself adds its smoke to 
the ocean mists, and its hilly summits to the 
generally bold landscape. The wide ex- 
panse of water, stretching north and south 
in the bay, changes color under the daylight 
in the most varied manner, according as cloud 
and sunshine, or as dawn, morning, afternoon, 
and sunset pass before you. In the summer- 
time the afternoon ocean mists enter, along 
with the steadily rising daily wind which falls 
only with the twilight. One of California's 
most successful poets. Miss Coolbrith, de- 
picts this scene in her poem entitled "Two 
Pictures." 

Morning 

" As in a quiet dream, 
The mighty waters seem: 
Scarcely a ripple shows 
Upon their blue repose. 
196 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

The sea-gulls smoothly ride 
Upon the drowsy tide, 
And a white sail doth sleep 
Far out upon the deep. 

A dreamy purple fills 
The hollows of the hills; 
A single cloud floats through 
The sky's serenest blue; 

And far beyond the Gate, 
The massed vapors wait — 
White as the walls that ring 
The City of the King. 

There is no sound, no word; 
Only a happy bird 
Trills to her nestling young, 
A little, sleepy song. 

This is the holy calm; 
The heavens dropping balm; 
The Love made manifest. 
And near; the perfect rest. 

Evening 

The day grows wan and cold; 
In through the Gate of Gold 
The restless vapors glide. 
Like ghosts upon the tide. 
197 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

The brown bird folds her wing, 
Sad, with no song to sing. 
Along the streets the dust 
Blows sharp, with sudden gust. 

The night comes, chill and gray; 
Over the sullen bay. 
What mournful echoes pass 
From lonely Alcatraz! 

O bell, with solemn toll. 
As for a passing soul ! 
As for a soul that waits. 
In vain, at heaven's gates. 

This is the utter blight; 
The sorrow infinite 
Of earth; the closing wave; 
The parting, and the grave." 

Such is the daily drama of the dry season 
at the bay. On the other hand, the rainy 
season itself contains some tragedies that in 
no wise belong to the eastern winter. There 
are the northers, with their periods of relative 
chill and their swift winged sternness; and 
these northers have often been celebrated in 
California verse. But apart from such colder 

198 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

periods, the loud roaring storms and heavy 
rains are often likely to stand in a curious 
contrast to the abounding life of vegetation 
which the rains themselves have aroused. It 
is possible to cultivate roses in one's garden 
throughout the greater part of the year. 
These, the rainy season will generally encour- 
age in their blooming. On the other hand, 
the stormy wind will from time to time de- 
stroy them with its own floods of cruelty. 
Miss Coolbrith depicts such a scene in the 
poem entitled, "My 'Cloth of Gold.'" As 
in tropical countries, so here the long storms 
seem often much darker and drearier by 
reason of their warfare with the rich life 
amidst which they rage. 

IV 

Such are a few of the many instances that 
might be given of the emotional reactions of 
sensitive minds in the presence of California 
nature. But now the outer aspect of nature 
unquestionably moulds both the emotions 
and the customs of mankind, insensibly af- 

199 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

fects men's temperaments in ways which, as 
we know, somehow or other tend to become 
hereditary, however we may view the vexed 
question concerning the heredity of acquired 
characters. Moreover, the influence of nature 
upon custom which every civilization depicts, 
is precisely the kind of influence that from 
moment to moment expresses itself psycho- 
logically in the more typical emotions of sensi- 
tive souls. Thus, one may observe that if 
we are considering the relation between civili- 
zation and climate, and are endeavoring to 
speculate in however vague a manner upon 
the future of a society in a given environment, 
we may well turn to the poets, not for a solu- 
tion of our problem, but for getting signifi- 
cant hints. Or, to put the case somewhat 
boldly otherwise, I should say that the vast 
processes which in the course of centuries 
appear in the changes of civilization due to 
climate, involve, as it were, tremendously 
complex mathematical functions. If it were 
possible for us to state these stupendous 
functions, we should be possessed of the secret 

200 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

of such social changes. Of such a stupendous 
function, a group of poems, expressing as 
they do momentary human clianges, might 
be called, if you like, a system of partial, and 
I admit very partial, differential equations. I 
do not hope to integrate any such system of 
equations, or to gain an exact view of the 
types of the functions from a consideration 
of them, and of course I admit with readiness 
that I am using only a very rough mathe- 
matical metaphor. But to translate the mat- 
ter once more into literal terms, the tenden- 
cies of the moment are in their way indications 
of what the tendencies of the ages are to be. 
Now what all this poetry in general psy- 
chologically means, quite apart from special 
moods, is that the Californian, of necessity, 
gains a kind of sensitiveness to nature which 
is different in type from the sensitiveness that 
a severer climate would inevitably involve, 
and different too in type from that belonging 
to climates mild but moist and more variable. 
In the first place, as you see, such a climate 
permits one to be a great deal out of doors in 

201 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

the midst of nature. It permits wide views, 
where the outlines are vast and in general 
clear. As, when you are on a steamer it is 
a matter of some skill to understand what are 
the actual conditions of wind and sea, while, 
when you are on a sailing vessel you con- 
stantly feel both the wind and the sea with a 
close intimacy that needs no technical knowl- 
edge to make it at least appreciated, so, in 
the case of such a climate as the one of Cali- 
fornia, your relations with nature are essen- 
tially intimate, whether you are a student of 
nature or not. Your dependence upon nature 
you feel in one sense more, and in another 
sense less, — more, because you are more 
constantly in touch with the natural changes 
of the moment; less, because you know that 
nature is less to be feared than under severer 
conditions. And this intimacy with nature 
means a certain change in your relations to 
your fellow-men. You get a sense of power 
from these wide views, a habit of personal 
independence from the contemplation of a 
world that the eye seems to own. Especially 

202 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

in country life the individual Californian 
consequently tends toward a certain kind of 
independence which I find in a strong and 
subtle contrast to the sort of independence 
that, for instance, the New England farmer 
cultivates. The New England farmer must 
fortify himself in his stronghold against the 
seasons. He must be ready to adapt himself 
to a year that permits him to prosper only 
upon decidedly hard terms. But the Cali- 
fornia country proprietor can have, during 
the drought, more leisure, unless, indeed, his 
ambition for wealth too much engrosses him. 
His horses are plenty and cheap. His fruit 
crops thrive easily. He is able to supply his 
table with fewer purchases, with less com- 
mercial dependence. His position is, there- 
fore, less that of the knight in his castle and 
more that of the free dweller in the summer 
cottage, who is indeed not at leisure, but can 
easily determine how he shall be busy. It is 
of little importance to him who his next 
neighbor is. At pleasure he can ride or 
drive a good way to find his friends; can 

203 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

choose, like the southern planter of former 
days, his own range of hospitality; can de- 
vote himself, if a man of cultivation, to read- 
ing during a good many hours at his own 
choice, or, if a man of sport, can find during 
a great part of the year easy opportunities 
for hunting or for camping both for himself 
and for the young people of his family. In 
the dry season he knows beforehand what 
engagements can be made, without regard 
to the state of the weather, since the state of 
the weather is predetermined. 

The free life and interchange of hospi- 
tality, so often described in the accounts of 
early California, has left its traces in the 
country life of California at the present day. 
Very readily, if you have moderate means, 
you can create your own quiet estate at a 
convenient distance from the nearest town. 
You may cover your house with a bower of 
roses, surround yourself with an orchard, 
quickly grow eucalyptus as a shade tree, and 
with nearly equal facility multiply other shade 
trees. You become, on easy terms, a pro- 

204 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

prietor, with estate and home of your own. 
Now all this holds, in a sense, of any mild cli- 
mate. But in California the more regular 
routine of wet and dry seasons modifies and 
renders more stable the general psychological 
consequences. All this is encouraging to a 
kind of harmonious individuality that already 
tends in the best instances toward a some- 
what Hellenic type. 

A colleague of my own, a New Englander 
of the strictest persuasion, who visited Cali- 
fornia for a short time when he was himself 
past middle life, returned enthusiastic with 
the report that the California countrymen 
seemed to him to resemble the ancient, yes, 
even the Homeric, Greeks of the Odyssey. 
The Californians had their independence of 
judgment; their carelessness of what a bar- 
barian might think, so long as he came from 
beyond the border; their apparent freedom 
in choosing what manner of men they should 
be; their ready and confident speech. All 
these things my friend at once noticed as 
characteristic. Thus different in type are 

205 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

these country proprietors from the equally 
individual, the secretively independent, the 
silently conscientious New England villagers. 
They are also quite different from the typical 
southern proprietors. From the latter they 
differ in having less tendency to respect tra- 
ditions, and in laying much less stress upon 
formal courtesies. The Californian, like the 
westerner in general, is likely to be somewhat 
abrupt in speech, and his recent coming to 
the land has made him on the whole quite in- 
different to family tradition. I myself, for 
instance, reached twenty years of age without 
ever becoming clearly conscious of what was 
meant by judging a man by his antecedents, 
a judgment that in an older and less isolated 
community is natural and inevitable, and 
that, I think, in most of our western com- 
munities, grows up more rapidly than it has 
grown up in California, where the geographi- 
cal isolation is added to the absence of tra- 
dition. To my own mind, in childhood, 
every human being was, with a few excep- 
tions, whatever he happened to be. He- 

206 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

reditaiy distinctions I appreciated only in 
case of four types of humanity. There were 
the Chinamen, there were the Irishmen, there 
were the Mexicans, and there were the rest of 
us. Within each of these types, every man, 
to my youthful mind, was precisely what God 
and himself had made him, and it was dis- 
tinctly a new point of view to attach a man 
to the antecedents that either his family or 
his other social relationships had determined 
for him. Now, I say, this type of individu- 
ality, known more or less in our western 
communities, but developed in peculiarly high 
degree in California, seems to me due not 
merely to the newness of the community, and 
not merely to that other factor of geographi- 
cal isolation that I just mentioned, but to the 
relation with nature of which we have already 
spoken. It is a free and on the whole an 
emotionally exciting, and also as we have 
said, an engrossing and intimate relation. 

In New England, if you are moody, you 
may wish to take a long walk out-of-doors, 
but that is not possible at all or even at most 

207 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

seasons. Nature may not be permitted to 
comfort you. In California, unless you are 
afraid of the rain, nature welcomes you at 
almost any time. The union of the man and 
the visible universe is free, is entirely un- 
checked by any hostility on the part of nature, 
and is such as easily fills one's mind with 
wealth of warm experience. Our poets just 
quoted have laid stress upon the directly or 
symbolically painful aspects of the scene. 
But these are sorrows of a sort that mean pre- 
cisely that relation with nature which I am 
trying to characterize, not the relation of hos- 
tility but of closeness. And this is the sort 
of closeness determined not merely by mild 
weather, but by long drought and by the rela- 
tive steadiness of all the climatic conditions. 
Now, I must feel that such tendencies are 
of vast importance, not merely to-day but 
for all time. They are tendencies whose 
moral significance in the life of California is 
of course both good and evil, since man's rela- 
tions with nature are, in general, a neutral 
material upon which ethical relations may 

208 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

be based. If you are industrious, this inti- 
macy with nature means constant coopera- 
tion, a cooperation never interrupted by frozen 
ground and deep snow. If you tend to idle- 
ness, nature's kindliness may make you all 
the more indolent, and indolence is a possible 
enough vice with the dwellers in all mild cli- 
mates. If you are morally careless, nature 
encourages your freedom, and tends in so 
far to develop a kind of morale frequently 
characteristic of the dwellers in gentle cli- 
mates. Yet the nature of California is not 
enervating. The nights are cool, even in 
hot weather; owing to the drought the mild- 
ness of the air is not necessarily harmful. 
Moreover, the nature that is so uniform also 
suggests in a very dignified way a regularity 
of existence, a definite reward for a definitely 
planned deed. Climate and weather are at 
their best always capricious, and, as we have 
seen, the variations of the California seasons 
have involved the farmers in much anxiety, 
and in many cases have given the farming 
business, as carried on in certain California 
p 209 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

communities, the same sort of gambling ten- 
dency that originally vitiated the social value 
of the mining industry. But on the other 
hand, as the conditions grew more stable, as 
agriculture developed, vast irrigation enter- 
prises introduced once more a conservative 
tendency. Here again for the definite deed 
nature secures a definite return. In regions 
subject to irrigation, man controls the weather 
as he cannot eslewhere. He is independent 
of the current season. And this tendency to 
organization — a tendency similar to the one 
that was obviously so potent in the vast 
ancient civilization of Egypt, — is present under 
Californian conditions, and will make itself 
felt. 

Individuality, then, but of a peculiar type, 
and a tendency despite all this individualism 
toward agricultural conservatism and a defi- 
nite social organization — these are already 
the results of this climate. 

V 

I have spoken already several times of the 

210 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

geographical isolation of this region. This 
has been a factor that was felt of course in the 
social life from the very outset, and more in 
the early days than at present. To be sure, 
it was never without its compensating features. 
It shows its influences in a way that varies 
with pretty definite periods of California his- 
tory. In the earliest days, before the new- 
comers in California supposed that agricul- 
ture was possible on any large scale, nearly 
everything was imported. Butter, for in- 
stance, was sent around the Horn to San 
Francisco. And throughout the early years 
most of the population felt, so to speak, 
morally rooted in the eastern communities 
from which they had sprung. This tendency 
retarded for a long time the development of 
California society, and made the pioneers 
careless as to the stability of their social 
structure; encouraged corrupt municipal ad- 
ministration in San Francisco; gave excuse 
for the lynching habit in the hastily organized 
mining communities. But a reaction quickly 
came. After the general good order which 

211 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

as a fact characterized the year 1849 had 
gradually given place, with the increase of 
population, to the disorders of 1851 and to 
the municipal errors of the years between 
1850 and 1856 in the city of San Francisco, 
there came a period of reform and of growing 
conservatism which marked all the time of the 
later mining period and of the transition to 
the agricultural period. During these years 
many who had come to California without 
any permanent purpose decided to become 
members of the community, and decided in 
consequence to create a community of which 
it was worth while to be a member. The 
consequence was the increase of the influence 
of the factor of geographical isolation in its 
social influence upon the life of California. 
The community became self-conscious, inde- 
pendent, indisposed to take advice from with- 
out, very confident of the future of the state 
and of the boundless prosperity soon to be 
expected; and within the years between 1860 
and 1870 a definite local tradition of California 
life was developed upon the basis of the memo- 

212 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

lies and characters that had been formed in 
the early days. The consequence was a pro- 
vincial California, whose ideals at last assumed 
that form of indifference to the barbarians 
beyond the border which my friend noticed 
as surviving even to the time of the visit of 
which I have spoken. 

But the completion of the transcontinental 
railway in 1869 introduced once more the 
factor of physical connection with the East, 
and of commercial rivalry with the investors 
of the Mississippi Valley who now undertook:, 
along with the capitalists of California, to 
supply the mining population of the still newer 
Rocky Mountain regions. On the whole, I 
should say that for a good while the provincial 
California, in the rather extremer sense of 
the tradition of the sixties and early seventies, 
held its own against the influence of the rail- 
way. But the original railway did not re- 
main alone. Other transcontinental lines 
developed. The southern portion of the state, 
long neglected during the early days, became, 
in the beginning of the eighties, the theatre 

213 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

of a new immigration and of a new and on 
the whole decidedly more eastern civilization. 
There has resulted since that time a third 
stage of California life and society, a stage 
marked by a union of the provincial in- 
dependence of the middle period with the 
complex social influences derived from the 
East and from the world at large. The Cali- 
fornia of to-day is still the theatre of the 
struggle of these opposing forces. 

VI 

It remains necessary to characterize more 
fully the way in which the consequences of 
the early days, joined to the geographical 
factors upon which we have already laid 
stress, have influenced the problems of Cali- 
fornia life and society. From the very outset, 
climate and geographical position, and the 
sort of life in which men were engaged, have 
encouraged types of individuality whose 
subtle distinction from those elsewhere to be 
found we have already attempted in a very 
inadequate fashion to suggest. Accordingly, 

214 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

from the first period down to the present 
time, the California community has been a 
notable theatre for the display of political 
and financial, and, on occasion, of intellectual 
individuality of decidedly extraordinary 
types. The history of both earlier and later 
California politics has been a very distinctly 
personal history. The political life of the 
years before the war had as their most pic- 
turesque incident the long struggle for the 
United States Senatorship carried on between 
David Broderick and William Gwin. This 
contest involved personalities far more than 
principles. Gwin and Broderick were both 
of them extremely picturesque figures, — 
the one a typical Irish-American, the other a 
Southerner. The story of their bitter warfare 
is a familiar California romance. The tragic 
death of Broderick, in duel with the once 
notorious Terry, is a tale that long had a de- 
cidedly national prominence. Terry him- 
self is an example of a type of individuality 
not elsewhere unknown in border life, but 
developed under peculiarly California n coii- 

215 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

ditions. Terry was, very frankly, a man of 
blood. Regarding him as a man of blood, 
one finds him in many ways, and within his 
own limits, an interesting, even a conscien- 
tious and attractive personality. He was at 
one time upon the Supreme Bench of the 
state of California. He warred with the 
Vigilance Committee of 1856 in a manner 
that certainly wins one's respect for his skill 
in bringing that organization into a very 
difficult position. He carried on this warfare 
both as judge of the Supreme Court and as 
wielder of a bowie knife. When he slew 
Broderick, he did so in a fashion that, so far 
as the duelling code permitted, was perfectly 
fair. He lived for years with a disposition 
to take the unpopular side of every question, 
to fight bitterly for causes for which no other 
man cared, and it was precisely for such a 
cause that he finally died. His attempted 
assault upon Judge Field, and the contro- 
versy that led thereto, and that resulted in 
Terry's death, was, a few years since, in every- 
body's memory. 

216 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

It would be wholly wrong to conceive Cali- 
fornia individuality as at all fairly represented 
by a border type such as Terry's. Yet when 
one looks about in California society and poli- 
tics, one finds even at the present day pictur- 
esque personalities preserving their pictur- 
esqueness amidst various grades of nobility 
and baseness, in a fashion more character- 
istic, I think, than is customary in most of 
our newer communities. The nobler sort 
of picturesque personality may be the public 
benefactor, like Lick or Sutro. He may be 
the social reformer of vast ideals, like Henry 
George. Or again the baser individual may 
be the ignorant demagogue of the grade of 
Dennis Kearney. Your California hero may 
be the chief of the Vigilance Committee of 
1856, or some other typical and admired pioneer, 
growing old in the glory of remembered early 
deeds. He may be the railway magnate, 
building a transcontinental line under all 
sorts of discouragements, winning a great 
fortune, and dying just as he founds a uni- 
versity. But in all these phases he remains 

217 



TIIK PACIFIC COAST 

the strong individual type of man that in a 
great democracy is always necessary. It is 
just this type that, as some of us fear, the con- 
ditions of our larger democracy in more east- 
ern regions tend far too much to eliminate. 
In California, such individuality is by no 
means yet eliminated. 

There is a symptom of this fact which I 
have frequently noted, both while I was a 
continuous resident of California and from 
time to time since. Individualistic communi- 
ties are almost universally, and paradoxically 
enough, communities that are extremely cruel 
to individuals. It is so in a debating club, 
where individuality is encouraged, but where 
every speaker is subject to fierce criticism. 
Now, this is still so in California to an extent 
which surprises even one who is used to the 
public controversies of some of our eastern 
cities. The individual who, by public action 
or utterance, rises above the general level in 
California, is subject to a kind of attack 
which strong men frequently enjoy, but which 
even the stranger finds on occasion peculiarly 

218 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

merciless. That absence of concern for a 
man's antecedents of which I before spoke, 
contributes to this very mercilessness. A 
friend once remarked to me that in California, 
Phillips Brooks, had he appeared there before 
reaching the very height of his reputation, 
would have had small chance to win a hearing, 
so little reverence would have been felt for 
the mere form of the causes that he maintained. 
This remark was perhaps unfair, since a 
stranger preacher — Thomas Starr King, 
— gained in early California days, at about 
the beginning of the war, a very great public 
reputation in a short time, received great 
sympathy, and had a mighty influence. But, 
on the other hand, it is perfectly certain that 
the public man who intends to maintain his 
ideals in California will have to do so under 
fire, and will have to be strong enough to 
bear the fire. His family, or the clubs to 
which he belongs, the university that he repre- 
sents, the church that supports him, — none of 
these factors will in such a community easily 
determine his standing. He works in a commu- 

219 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

nity where the pioneer tradition still remains, 
— the tradition of independence and of dis- 
trust toward enthusiasm. For one feels in 
California, very keenly, that enthusiasm may 
after all mean sham, until one is quite sure 
that it has been severely tested. And this 
same community, so far as its country popu- 
lation is concerned, is made up of persons 
who, whether pioneers or newcomers, live in 
the aforesaid agricultural freedom, in easy 
touch with nature, not afraid of the senti- 
ments of the crowd, although of course dis- 
posed, like other human beings, to be affected 
by a popular cry in so far as it attacks men 
or declares new ideals insignificant. It is 
much more difficult to arouse the enthusiastic 
sympathy of such people than it is, in case 
one has the advantage of the proper social 
backing, to affect the public opinion of a more 
highly organized social order in a less isolated 
region. 

And now we have seen the various ways in 
which this sort of individuality is a product of 
the natural features of the state as well as of 

220 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

those early conditions which themselves were 
determined by geographical factors. On the 
other hand, in addition to this prevalence of 
individuality and this concomitant severity 
of the judgment of prominent individuals, 
there are social conditions characteristic of 
San Francisco which can also be referred to 
geographical and climatic factors. Early in 
the development of San Francisco a difficulty 
in the education of the young appeared 
which, as I fancy, has not yet been removed. 
This difficulty had to do with the easy de- 
velopment of vagrancy in city children. Va- 
grancy is a universal evil of cities, but the 
California vagrant can easily pass the night 
out-doors during the greater part of the year. 
A friend of mine who was connected with 
the management of San Francisco public 
schools for a number of years, laid stress upon 
this climatic factor and its dangers in official 
communications published at the time of his 
office. The now too well-known name of 
"hoodlum" originated in San Francisco, and 
is said to have been the name adopted by a 

221 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

particular group of young men. The social 
complications of the time of the sand-lot, 
when Dennis Kearney led laborers into a 
dangerous pass, were again favored by cli- 
matic conditions. Public meetings out-of- 
doors and in the sand-lot could be held with 
a certain freedom and persistency in Cali- 
fornia that would be impossible without inter- 
ruption elsewhere. While such factors have 
nothing to do with discontent, they greatly 
increase the opportunities for agitation. The 
new constitution of California, adopted in 
1879, was carried at the polls by a combina- 
tion of the working men of San Francisco 
with the dissatisfied farmers of the interior. 
This dissatisfaction of the farmers was no 
doubt due in the main to the inadequacy of 
their comprehension of the material condi- 
tions under which they were working. The 
position of California — its geographical iso- 
lation again — has been one complicating 
factor for the California farmer, since luxuri- 
ant nature easily furnished him, in case he 
should use wise methods, with a rich supply, 

222 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

while his geographical isolation made access 
to market somewhat difficult. This diffi- 
culty about the markets long affected Cali- 
fornia political life in the form of dissatisfac- 
tion felt against the railway, which was of 
course held responsible and which in fact for 
years was more or less responsible for an 
increase of these difficulties of reaching the 
market. Well, this entire series of compli- 
cations, which in 1879 combined San Fran- 
cisco working men w4th the farmers of the 
interior, and changed the constitution of the 
state, is an example of the complex way in 
which the geographical situation and the 
factors of climate have acted to afi'ect social 
movements. 

On the other hand, the individuality afore- 
said, when brought into the presence of such 
social agitations, has frequently proved in 
California life a conservative factor of great 
importance. The mol) may be swept away 
for a time by an agitating idea. But the indi- 
vidual Californian himself is suspicious of 
mobs. The agitations in question proved 

223 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

transient. Even the constitution, designed 
to give the discontented whatever they most 
supposed they wanted, proved to be sus- 
ceptible of a very conservative construction 
by the courts, and public opinion in Cali- 
fornia has never been very long under the 
sway of any one illusion. The individuality 
that we have described quickly revolts against 
its false prophets. In party politics, Cali- 
fornia proves to be an extremely doubtful 
state. Party ties are not close. The vote 
changes from election to election. The inde- 
pendent voter is well in place. Finally, 
through all these tendencies, there runs a 
certain idealism, often more or less uncon- 
scious. This idealism is partly due to the 
memory of the romance due to the unique 
marvels of the early days. It is also sus- 
tained by precisely that intimacy with nature 
which renders the younger Californians so 
sensitive. I think that perhaps Edward 
Rowland Sill, whose poems are nowadays so 
widely appreciated, has given the most repre- 
sentative expression to the resulting spirit 

224 



THE PACIFIC COAST 

of California, to that tension between indi- 
vidualism and loyalty, between shrewd con- 
servatism and bold radicalism, which marks 
this community. 



225 



SOME RELATIONS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING 
TO THE PRESENT PROBLEMS OF MORAL 
EDUCATION IN AMERICA 



SOME RELATIONS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING 
TO THE PRESENT PROBLEMS OF MORAL 
EDUCATION IN AMERICA » 

XN asking me to address this Society, your 
Secretary was well aware that I have no right 
and no desire to pass judgment upon any of 
the more technical problems which are peculiar 
to the profession of physical education. But 
there are problems which are common to your 
profession and to that region of inquiry to 
which I am most devoted. These common 
problems, in fact, interest all who are con- 
cerned in the welfare of humanity, and who in 
particular aim to further the welfare of our 
country. I refer to those problems of moral 
education which, in the present time, assume 
new and difficult forms in American life. I 
am well aware that those of you, and of your 
numerous colleagues, who have been most 

' An address before the Boston Physical Education Associa- 
tion. 

229 



PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

earnest in furthering the cause of physical 
education, not only in our land, but in Europe, 
have always laid great stress upon the close 
relation of sound physical training to good 
moral training. And we all know how, from 
primitive times, mankind have used various 
forms of physical exercise as a part of the 
discipline which tribes or, later, nations or, 
in our modern days, civilized men generally, 
have regarded as fitted to form whatever 
well-rounded types of individual character 
the various stages of human culture have 
admired. Physical training has repeatedly 
had, in the past, a place in the religious life 
of various peoples, and systems of secular 
training have often so much the more fol- 
lowed analogous lines. Chivalry in Europe, 
Bushido in Japan, were systems of conduct 
which were inseparable from various plans 
for physical training. To-day most of you lay 
constant stress upon your function, not only 
as teachers who care for the health, for the 
physical growth, and for the accompanying 
intellectual development of your pupils, but 

230 



PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

as instructors who contribute what you all 
believe to be a very significant part of the 
moral education of the youth of the country. 
The social organizations known as Young 
Men's Christian Associations are the expres- 
sion of explicitly religious motives, and are 
unquestionably intended for an ethical pur- 
pose. But they regard their gymnasiums 
as an essential part of their work. And this 
is but one example of the recognition of a 
close linkage between physical and moral 
training, — a linkage which you all believe 
to be important, and which most of you con- 
sciously emphasize in your own practice. 

The problems of moral education are com- 
mon, then, to you and to your colleagues in 
other branches of education, of inquiry, and 
of social work. I myself, as a teacher of 
philosophy, have lately been led to consider 
some of the problems of ethics with especial 
reference to the present state of our American 
civilization. I have supposed, therefore, that 
you might be interested if I now attempt to 
state some of these problems in a way to 

231 



PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

suggest their possible connections with your 
profession. I make these suggestions very ten- 
tatively. As a student of philosophy, I have, 
indeed, my rights as an inquirer into ethical 
questions. But, when I try to tell you my 
view about how some of these questions relate 
to your calling, I at once run the risks which 
any man runs who attempts to connect his 
own views with those of others, by appealing 
to his fellows regarding the matters in which 
they are expert while he is not expert. But, 
in any case, I shall try to keep to the ground 
that is common to your calling and to mine. 
You all of you are interested in what some of 
you may call the philosophy of physical train- 
ing. I am professionally concerned with 
philosophy. And so I want to meet you 
upon this common basis of your interest and 
mine in the questions which concern what I 
may call the moral philosophy of your calling. 

I 

I shall begin by asking what we mean by 
the moral training of an individual man. 

232 



PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

This question we can best attempt to an- 
swer by sketching a moral ideal, — an ideal of 
what, as I suppose, we all, more or less con- 
sciously, desire any moral agent to become. 
If we define this ideal, then the moral training 
of an individual will be defined as the training 
that is best adapted to help that individual 
to approach this moral ideal. 

The ideal human moral agent, as I assert, 
is a man who is whole-heartedly and effect- 
ively loyal to some fitting object of loyalty. 
This first statement of the moral ideal may 
seem vague to you. I hasten to explain a 
little more precisely what I mean. 

I have chosen the good old word " loyal " as 
the word best adapted to arouse, with the 
fewest misleading associations, that idea of 
the moral life which I believe to be rationally 
the most defensible. But, of course, my own 
usage of the word *' loyal " must attempt to 
be more exact than the traditional usage is, 
because such popular words are always ap- 
plied somewhat recklessly; and the loyalty 
that I have in mind when I employ this term 

233 



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is something that I try to conceive in as exact 
a fashion as the subject permits. " Loyalty," 
as popularly understood, has always meant 
a certain attitude of mind which faithful 
friends, lovers, soldiers, or retainers, or which 
martyrs dying for their faith have exemplified. 
Plainly, a good many different sorts of people 
and of deeds have been called loyal. And, 
if you view the matter merely upon the basis 
of a comparison of a few widely various 
instances of loyalty, you may be disposed to 
say that the moral quality in question is too 
wavering and confused a feature of character 
to be fitly used as a type of all moral excellence. 
Cannot robbers be loyal to their band, slaves 
to their master, mischievous boys to the com- 
rades whose pranks they incite and applaud, 
but whose names they refuse to tell to any 
teacher.^ Is loyalty, then, always a trait of 
the morally wise or of the good.? Is it a 
typical virtue ? Is it not rather an accidental 
accompaniment of goodness or, at best, a 
special form which goodness may sometimes 
take .'' 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

I answer that all these just-mentioned 
instances of loyalty — even the loyalty of 
the robber to his band — involve some morally 
good features. My own definition of loyalty 
as a fundamental virtue is intended, first to 
emphasize these good features, which even the 
blindest forms of loyalty exemplify, then to 
separate these good features from their acci- 
dental setting, and then to define the ideal 
toward which all the forms of loyalty seem 
to me to tend. I will therefore proceed at 
once to characterize loyalty as it appears in 
its most typical instances and on higher 
levels. 

Loyalty, as I view the essence of this trait, 
means, in the first place, a certain attitude 
of mind which we can best understand by 
considering cases of strong and hearty loyalty 
as they occur in the life of a mature and highly 
trained man. This loyal attitude makes a 
man give himself to the active service of a 
cause. This cause is one which the loyal 
man regards, at the moment of action, as 
something beyond his own private self, and 

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as larger than this private self, as vaster 
and worthier than any of his private interests. 
And yet, for the loyal man, his whole private 
self meanwhile seems inspired by the cause, 
so that, while he is engaged in his loyal activity, 
his eyes, his ears, his tongue, his hand, his 
whole strength, exist, for the time, simply as 
the organs of his loyalty. When a man is 
loyal and is actively engaged in his loyal un- 
dertakings, he is keenly and clearly conscious, 
therefore, of a strong contrast, and yet of an 
equally strong unity, present in his life and 
in his deeds. He himself, the natural man, 
with his desires and his private interests, 
with his muscles and his sense organs, with his 
property and his powers, — he is there in 
the world, and he knows this natural self 
of his, he is definitely aware of it. For loyalty 
is never mere self-forgetfulness ; it is self- 
devotion. And you cannot devote yourself 
unless you are aware of yourself. The loyal 
man lives intensely, vigorously, personally; 
and over against this natural self of his is his 
cause, — his side in a game, his army in com- 

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bat, his country in danger, or perhaps his 
friend, his beloved, his family, humanity, 
God. He is conscious of this cause; and so 
the cause is, in great part, sharply contrasted 
with this private self of his. It is outside of 
him, — something vast, dignified, imposing, 
compelling, objective. Were he not aware 
of this sharp contrast between himself and his 
cause, he could not be loyal ; for without the 
contrast the whole affair would be merely one 
of his private interests and passions. The 
cause meanwhile is itself no mere thing amongst 
things. It has at least the value of a person 
or of a system of persons. It is always, in 
fact, for any deeply loyal man, something 
which is at once personal and superpersonal, 
as your family and your country are for you. 
One cannot be loyal to merely inanimate 
things as such. And yet, on the other hand, 
loyalty always views persons in their deeper 
relations to something that seems larger than 
any one human personality or than any mere 
collection of persons can be. Thus your family 
is, for your family loyalty, more than the mere 

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collection of its members; and the Joseph 
of the story was loyal to his brotherly and to 
his filial ties, and not merely to the various 
individual brethren. 

Well, this contrast of the natural man and 
of his imposing and objective cause is a fact 
of which the loyal man is keenly conscious. 
Yet, despite this fact, he is just as conscious 
that by his deeds he is always reducing his 
contrast ever afresh to unity. So long as he 
is indeed active, wide-awake, effectively loyal, 
he exists only as servant of this cause. The 
cause, then, is not only another than his 
private self; it is in a sense his larger self. 
Despite the contrast he becomes one with it 
through his every loyal deed. His private 
self is its willing instrument. The cause 
inspires him, acts through him. Loyalty 
is a sort of possession. It has a demonic 
force which controls the wayward private 
self. The cause takes hold of the man, and 
his organism is no longer his own, so long as 
the loyal inspiration is upon him. 

Such, I say, is, in the briefest language, 
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a general characterization of the character- 
istic loyal attitude as it exists in its strong 
and maturely developed forms, and especially 
in the moments of our effectively loyal conduct. 
The boys, loyal to their mates, have the be- 
ginnings of loyalty, often in evanescent forms. 
The simple-minded folk who do not reflect 
are not always so keenly conscious of their 
loyalty as more thoughtful folk may be; but 
all the more are they able to prove their 
loyalty by their deeds. The fully mature and 
reflectively devoted man knows his loyalty, 
and is possessed by it. 

For loyalty, as you see, is essentially an 
active virtue. It involves manifold senti- 
ments, — love, good-will, earnestness, de- 
light in the cause; but it is complete only in 
motor terms, never in merely sentimental 
terms. It is useless to call my feelings loyal un- 
less my muscles somehow express this loyalty. 
For my objective cause and my inner private 
self, in case I am loyal, are sharply contrasted. 
I have to think of both of them, if I am to be 
loyal ; but they must be brought into unity. 

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Only my deeds can accomplish this result. 
My loyal sentiments, if left to themselves, 
would merely emphasize the contrast without 
giving life any acceptable unity. Loyal is 
that loyally does. Hence the loyal attitude 
is one which especially interests any teacher 
who is concerned with what his pupil does. 
The nature of loyalty, then, in the pupil should 
interest any teacher of physical training who is 
considerate of the moral aspects of his calling. 
To be sure, on its higher levels, — in its ideal 
expressions, — loyalty goes over into regions 
where mere physical training seems to be very 
remote from the forms of loyalty that are in 
question. For loyalty, as I hold, includes in 
its spirit whatever has been meant in the past 
by the various inner virtues of sentiment, by 
charity, by high-mindedness, by spiritual 
training. It includes these virtues because 
the loyal act needs and expresses the loyal 
sentiment. But loyalty combines the senti- 
ments with all the active virtues, — with 
courage, with patience, with moral initiative, 
— according as these are needed in one situa- 

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tion or in another. Yet on even its highest 
levels loyalty has its physical expression. 
For one is loyal through his deed. If I were 
here to define the moral ideal in terms of 
the Pauline virtue of charity, as described in 
the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, we 
should have indeed some difficulty in pointing 
out within the limits of this paper the various 
intermediate steps by which this lofty spiritual 
virtue of the apostle is linked, as of course it is 
indeed linked, with the motor activities whereby 
our organism expresses our will. But, when 
I now define the moral ideal directly in terms 
of the loyal attitude, you all see at once how 
nobody can be effectively loyal unless he is 
highly trained on the motor side, and unless 
his ideas and his moral sentiments have long 
since won their way to an elaborate expression 
in the deeds of his organism. And so it is 
indeed plain that surely one way, at least, to 
prepare a man for a loyal life, is to give him 
a careful and extended motor training, such 
as organizes his conduct in harmony with his 
nobler sentiments. This you all see ; and you 
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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

know that the Japanese long ago saw it also, 
so that an essential part of their training in 
Bushido — that is, in their ancient code of 
chivalrous loyalty — was a training in the 
physical arts of a Samurai. Our very first 
view of loyalty suggests then a sense in which 
physical and moral training may be closely 
related. But before we estimate what this 
relation means we must get a fuller notion of 
what loyalty itself means. 

II 

I have so far only characterized the general 
attitude of the higher types of loyalty. Loyalty 
such as has now been defined may of course 
take countless special forms. And these forms 
may appear to be in conflict with one another. 
In practice the expressions of loyalty do in 
fact often conflict with one another. The 
loyal are often quarrelsome. Men can be 
equally devoted servants of their various 
causes and yet pass their lives in trying to kill 
one another. But, since I have so far em- 
phasized the central significance of loyalty 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

as a moral ideal, you may well wonder whether 
I am indeed right to make loyalty thus central. 
And so you may well ask me what I have to 
say, as a moralist, regarding those conflicts 
of loyalty of which so large a part of the 
history of mankind has consisted. When 
equally loyal people are found fighting to- 
gether, when the heroic devotion of all that a 
man has and is to the cause which he has 
chosen as his own appears to demand of him 
that he should fight and perhaps slay his 
fellow-man, — well, as you may next ask, in 
such cases. Who is right? And, if loyalty 
is indeed any guide to right conduct, why 
should loyalty counsel me, as it so often seems 
to do, to oppose and to condemn the loyalty 
of my fellow? Must there not then be some 
higher moral principle than that of loyalty, — 
some principle in terms of which we can 
find out who is right when two forms of loyalty 
contradict each other's claims, while each 
pretends to be the only true loyalty? After 
all, — as you may insist, — have I shown in 
the foregoing why the robber ought not to be 

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loyal to his band ? Have I shown what w ise 
loyalty is as distinguished from slavish or 
base loyalty? Have not countless crimes 
been committed in the name of loyalty ? 

To such questions I at once answer that, in 
making loyalty central as a moral principle, 
I mean to define loyalty in a sense which in 
the end will make explicit what the true 
and implied meaning of all loyalty is, even in 
the cases where loyalty, like love in the prov- 
erb, is blind. I defined the loyal attitude 
as something characteristic of a certain type 
of personal life. I have said that the genuinely 
moral attitude is always one of loyalty. I 
have meant, and I shall indeed stoutly insist, 
that nobody has reached any morally ideal 
position who is not, in his more active life, 
loyal to some cause or to some system of causes. 
I maintain that without loyalty there is no 
thoroughgoing morality; and I also insist 
that all special virtues and duties, such as 
those which the names benevolence, truth- 
fulness, justice, spirituality, charity, recall to 
our minds, are parts or are special forms of 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

loyalty. My theory is that the whole moral 
law is implicitly bound up in the one precept: 
Be loyal. But I freely admit that many men 
who have been enthusiastically and effectively 
loyal to various causes, and who in their per- 
sonal lives have won as mature a notion of 
loyalty as they were capable of getting, have 
nevertheless often committed, in the name of 
loyalty, great crimes. And you may well 
ask how I explain this fact. You may well 
wonder how loyalty can be a central moral 
principle, when lives that were as loyal as the 
men in question knew how to make them have 
often been morally mischievous lives. 

My answer is that our loyalty leads us into 
moral error only in so far as we are indeed 
often blind to what the principle of loyalty 
actually means and requires. And such blind- 
ness is, as men go, human enough and com- 
mon enough. The corrective to such errors, 
however, is not the introduction of some 
other moral principle than that of loyalty 
but is just the discovery of the internal mean- 
ing, the true sense of the loyal principle itself. 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

Whoever is loyal loves loyalty for its own 
sake. Let him merely bethink him of what 
this love for loyalty means, and he will be led 
to that definition of the precept : Be loyal, — 
to that definition, I say, which gives to this 
principle its true scope. 

Loyalty, namely, is a common good, — 
I might say that it is the common good of 
morally trained mankind. This, however, 
does not mean that all men ought to define 
in the same monotonous terms the causes to 
which they are to be loyal. There is a diver- 
sity of causes. There is one spirit of loyalty. 
In the spirit of loyalty, viewed just as a per- 
sonal attitude, lies the only universal solution 
of the problem of every private personality. 
What am I here for.^ So a man may ask 
himself. And the rational answer is: You 
are here to become absorbed in a devotion 
to some cause or system of causes. Your 
devotion must be as thorough as your effective 
power to do work is highly developed. Herein 
alone lies the solution of your personal prob- 
lem. In case you are loyal to nothing, your 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

existence as a private individual will remain 
to you a mysterious burden, which you may 
learn to tolerate, or even, if you are lucky and 
thoughtless, to enjoy, but which you can never 
discover to be anything of rational meaning 
unless you take yourself to be a centre of 
activity of which some spiritual power to which 
you are loyally devoted makes use. And 
this power must be much bigger and worthier 
than your private fortunes, taken by them- 
selves, can ever become. If such a spiritual 
power, such a cause, such a god stronger than 
you are, enters you, possesses you, uses you, 
and finds you its willingly loyal instrument, 
then you, just as you, have an office, a function, 
a place, a status, a right, in the world. This 
your right will become manifest to you only 
through your loyal deeds. You will work 
in the spirit of your cause. Your powers will 
be dedicated to the cause, and the otherwise 
miserable natural accident that there you are, 
with just your sensations, your ideas, and 
your physical organism, will become trans- 
formed into a notable event in the great world, 

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— the event that precisely your unique ser- 
vice of your chosen cause has come to pass by 
your own wilj. 

Loyalty, then, — the general spirit of loyalty, 
I now mean, — is a common good of mankind. 
It is the only good the possession of which 
makes any man's being thoroughly worth 
while from his own more rational point of 
view. Now, if this be so, loyalty, taken in 
its universal meaning, is just as much a true 
good in the world when my neighbor possesses 
it as when I possess it. If once I am wide- 
awake enough to grasp this fact, I shall value 
my neighbor's loyalty just as highly as I do 
my own. He indeed will be loyal to his cause, 
I to mine. Our causes may be very diverse, 
but our spirit will be one. And so the very 
essence of my spirit of loyalty will demand 
that I state my principle thus: Be loyal, and 
be in such wise loyal that, whatever your 
own cause, you remain loyal to loyalty. That 
is, so choose your cause, and so serve it, that, 
as a result of your activity, there shall be 
more of this common good of loyalty in the 

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world than there would have been, had you 
not lived and acted. Let your loyalty be such 
loyalty as helps your neighbor to be loyal. 
Despite the diversity of the individual causes 
— the families, countries, professions, friend- 
ships — to which you and your neighbor are 
loyal, so act that the devotion of each shall 
respect and aid the other's loyalty. 

This simpler statement of the true meaning 
of the principle of loyalty enables us at once 
to see that, when in the past loyalty has led 
men into crimes, — that is, into needless 
hostility to other people's loyalty, — it has 
done so, not because the men were loyal, but 
because they were blind to what their own 
loyalty signified. If they loved loyalty for its 
own sake (and this they did in case they were 
indeed loyal), then they valued loyalty not 
as their private possession, but for its own 
dear sake, as a type of spiritual activity, as a 
sort of human interest, that makes human 
life morally worth while for any man who 
shares this spirit. If they had remembered 
this fact, and if they had seen what the fact 

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meant, they would have respected in their 
neighbors' lives every form of genuine loyalty, 
wherever they met with it. And then they 
would have seen that the spirit of our true 
loyalty is never opposed to the existence of 
our neighbor's loyalty. Charity, benevolence, 
and — simplest of all — plain fair play are 
tendencies that are thus to be ethically defined 
and deduced from our central principle. All 
such virtues are expressions of that loyalty 
to loyalty which I have now defined as the 
genuine and enlightened incorporation of the 
loyal spirit. Wherever a soldier has honored 
the heroism and devotion of his enemy, this 
honor, if it has taken practical form, has been 
an instance of loyalty to loyalty. One soldier 
fights for one cause, the other for the other. 
But each may, even as warrior, respect his 
opponent's loyalty. Let the spirit of this 
loyalty to loyalty spread amongst us, and it 
will, indeed, in no wise mean that we shall 
all individually serve the same causes. We 
must have our various causes, just as we have 
our various families. And no man's loyalty 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

ought to consist wholly in a devotion to the 
same causes that other men serve. Loyalty 
is, for each man, something personal, individ- 
ual. And yet, as I insist, the spirit of loyalty 
is a common good for all men. Each man 
must solve his own problem of life by means 
of his own form of loyalty. But the one cause 
that we shall all have in common will be the 
cause of loyalty to loyalty; that is, we shall 
all be disposed to make all men more loyal. 
Every man's individual devotion to his own 
cause will be just his own, but his example 
of loyalty, his eagerness to be the instrument 
of his own cause, will be a help and not a hin- 
drance to his neighbors in the fostering of their 
individual form of the loyal spirit. Let this 
spirit of loyalty to loyalty grow amongst us, 
I say, and then we shall, indeed, rejoice in the 
loyalty of foreigners to their own nations in- 
stead of despising them for having the wrong 
country to dwell in. Let this spirit of loyalty 
to loyalty become universal, and then wars will 
cease; for then the nations, without indeed 
lapsing into any merely international mass, 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

will so respect each the loyalty of the others 
that aggression will come to seem inhuman. 
And instead of war there will then remain 
only the sort of cheerful rivalry amongst our 
various forms of loyalty which at present 
is finely represented by good sport when fair 
play prevails. For in true sport one's loyalty 
to one's own side exists as immediately ex- 
pressed in deeds which fully respect the op- 
ponent's loyalty to his own side, and which 
involve that loyalty to the rules of the game, 
and so to the common loyalty of both the op- 
posing sides, which constitutes fair play. 

Ill 

Thus, if you please, I have sketched for you 
the basis of a moral philosophy. The rational 
solution of moral problems rests on the prin- 
ciple: Be loyal. This principle, properly 
understood, involves two consequences. The 
first is this : Have a cause, choose a cause, 
give yourself over to that cause actively, 
devotedly, whole-heartedly, practically. Let 
this cause be something social, serviceable, 

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requiring loval devotion. Let this cause, or 
system of causes, constitute a life work. Let 
the cause possess your senses, your attention, 
your muscles, — all your powers, so long as 
you are indeed active and awake at all. See 
that you do not rest in any mere sentiment of 
devotion to the cause. Act out your loyalty. 
Loyalty exists in the form of deeds done by 
the willing and devoted instrument of his 
chosen cause. This is the first consequence of 
the commandment : Be loi/al. The second 
consequence is like unto the first. It is this : 
Be loyal to loijaltij. That is, regard your 
neighbor's loyalty as something sacred. Do 
nothing to make him less loyal. Never de- 
spise him for his loyalty, however little you 
care for the cause that he chooses. If your 
cause and his cause come into some inevitable 
conflict, so that you indeetl have to contend 
with him, fight, if your loyalty requires you to 
do so; but in your bitterest warfare fight only 
against what the opponent does. Thwart his 
acts where he justly should be thwarted; but 
do all this in the verv cause of lovalty itself, 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

and never do anything to make your neighbor 
disloyal. Never do anything to encourage 
him in any form of disloyalty; in other words, 
never war against his loyalty. From these 
consequences of my central principle follow, 
as I maintain, all those propositions about 
the special duties of life which can be reason- 
ably defined and defended. Justice, kind- 
liness, chivalry, charity, — these are all of 
them forms of loyalty to loyalty. 

Even while I have set forth this sketch of a 
general ethical doctrine, I have intentionally 
illustrated my views by some references to 
your professional work. But at this point I 
next have briefly to emphasize the positive 
relations which physical education may have 
and should have to the training of the loyal 
spirit. Here I shall simply repeat what others, 
more expert than I am, have long since, in 
various speech, set forth. 

The first way in w^hich systematic physical 
training of all grades and at all ages may be of 
positive service in a moral education is this: 
Loyalty, as we have seen, means a willing 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

and thoroughgoing devotion of the whole 
active self to a chosen cause or to a chosen 
system of causes. But such devotion, as we 
have also seen, is a motor process. One must 
be in control of one's powers, or one has no 
self to give to one's cause. One must get a 
personality in order to be able to surrender 
this personality to anything. And since 
physical training actually has that relation 
to the culture of the will which your leaders 
so generally emphasize, while some physical 
expression of one's personality is an essential 
accompaniment of the existence of every 
human personality, — for both of these rea- 
sons, I say, the training of physical strength 
and skill is one important preparation for a 
moral life. There is indeed a great deal else 
in moral training besides what physical train- 
ing supplies; but the physical training can be 
a powerful auxiliary. Here I come upon 
ground that is familiar to all of you, and that 
I need not attempt to cover anew with sug- 
gestions of my own. The positive relation 
of good physical training to the formation of 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

a sound will is known to all of you. The only 
relatively new aspect of this familiar region 
that may have been brought to light by the 
foregoing considerations is this : Loyalty, 
as you see, on its highest levels involves the 
same general mental features which are pres- 
ent whenever a physical activity, at once stren- 
uous and skilful, is going on. As a skilful 
and difficult physical exercise demands that 
one should keep his head in the midst of 
efforts that, by reason of the strain, or of the 
excitement, — by reason of the very magni- 
tude and fascination of the task, would con- 
fuse the untrained man, and make him lose 
a sense of what he was trying to do, even so 
the work of the effectively loyal person is 
always one which requires that he should 
stand in presence of undertakings large enough 
to threaten to cloud his judgment and to crush 
his self-control, while his loyalty still de- 
mands that he also should keep his head despite 
the strain, and should retain steady control 
of his personality, even in order to devote it 
to the cause. Loyalty means hard work 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

in the presence of serious responsibilities. 
The danger of such work is closely similar 
to the danger of losing one's head in a difficult 
physical activity. One is devoting the self 
to the cause. The cause must be vast. For 
its very vastness is part of what gives it worth. 
I cannot be loyal to what requires of me no 
effort. But the consciousness of the vastness 
and difficulty of one's cause tends to crush the 
self of the person who is trying to be loyal. 
And a self crushed into a loss of self-possession, 
a self no longer aware of its powers, a self 
that has lost sight of its true contrast with 
the objects about it, has no longer left the 
powers which it can devote to any cause. 
Mere good-will is no substitute for trained self- 
possession either in physical or in moral 
activities. And self-possession is a necessary 
condition for self-devotion. When the apostle 
compared the moral work of the saints to the 
running of a race, his metaphors were there- 
fore chosen because of this perfectly definite 
analocry between the devotion of the trained 
organism to its physical task and the devotion 
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THYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

of the moral self to its cause. In both classes 
of cases, in loyal devotion and in skilful 
and strenuous physical exercise, similar men- 
tal problems have to be solved. One has to 
keep the self in sight in order to surrender 
it anew, through each deed, to the task in 
hand. Meanwhile, since the task is centred 
upon something outside of the self, and is a 
serious and an imposing task, it involves a 
tendency to strain, to excitement, to a loss of 
a due self-possession, to disturbance of the 
equilibrium of consciousness. The result is 
likely to be, unless one is in a state of physical 
or of moral training, just a primary confusion 
of self-consciousness accompanied by fear 
or by a sense of helplessness. Against such 
a mood the mere sentiment of devotion is no 
safeguard. To hold on to one's self at the 
moment of the greatest strain, to retain clear- 
ness, even when confronted by tasks too large 
to be carried out as one wishes, to persist 
doggedly despite defeats, to give up all mere 
self-will and yet to retain full self-control, — 
these are requirements which, as I suppose, 

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appear to the consciousness of the athlete and 
to the consciousness of the moral hero in 
decidedly analogous ways. And in both cases 
the processes involved are psycho-physical 
as well as psychical, and are subject to the 
general laws of physiology and of psychology. 
Hence, when the teacher of physical training 
regards his work as a preparation of his 
pupils for the moral life, he can and should 
take account and take advantage of these 
analogies. His art is indeed one only amongst 
the many arts that contribute to moral train- 
ing. But he may well insist that the organic 
virtues that he aims to establish in the bodily 
activities of his pupils are not only analogous 
to the moral virtues, but, in the loyal, may 
form a literal part of those virtues, since vir- 
tue exists either in action or in those results 
of training which prepare us for right action. 
To say all this implies no exaggeration of the 
importance of such physical education as is 
actually given at the present time. The whole 
question is one, not of inevitable or of fatal 
results, but of the good work that may be done, 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

and of an alliance of the motives of physical 
and of moral training such as may take place 
if the teacher of physical training is alive to 
the higher possibilities of his calling. 

IV 

The second way in which physical training 
may serve the purposes of moral training is a 
more direct way. It is the one which Dr. 
Luther Gulick had in mind when he lately 
asserted in a paper in the School Review that 
*' athletics are primarily social and moral in 
their nature." Dr. Gulick is well known to 
you as one of the protagonists in the cause of 
the moral importance of physical education; 
and you know his main argument. Social 
training, in boys about twelve years of age, 
naturally takes the form of the training which 
gangs of boys give to their members. A gang 
of boys with nothing significant to do may 
become more or less of a menace to the general 
social order. A gang of boys duly organized 
into athletic teams, in the service of schools, 
and of other expressions of wholesome com- 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

munity activity, will become centres for train- 
ing in certain types of loyalty. And this 
training may extend its influence to large 
bodies of boys who, as spectators of games or 
as schoolmates, are more or less influenced 
by the athletic spirit. Mutatis mutandis, 
the same considerations apply to the socially 
organizing forces that belong to college ath- 
letics. The plans of those who are engaged 
in physical education may therefore well be 
guided, from the first, by a disposition to pre- 
pare young people to appreciate and to take 
part in such group activities as these. Thus 
both the physiological and the intellectual 
aspects of physical training would appear to 
be subordinate, after all, to the social, and in 
this way to the moral, aspects of the profession. 
In speaking of these moral aspects, one would 
not even emphasize, as much as many do, the 
central significance of the self-denial, of the 
personal restraints and sacrifices, of the mor- 
ally advantageous physical habits, which at- 
tend athletic training. One would rather 
more centrally emphasize the view that 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IX AMERICA 

athletic work is not merely a preparation for 
loyalty, but that in case of the life of the 
organized athletic teams, and in case of any 
physical training class of pupils who work 
together, the athletic work is loyalty itself, — 
loyalty in simple forms, but in forms which 
appeal to the natural enthusiasm of youth, 
which are adapted to the boyish and later to 
the adolescent phases of evolution, and which 
are a positive training for the very tasks which 
adult loyalty exemplifies; namely, the tasks 
that imply the devotion of a man's whole 
power to an office that takes him out of his 
private self and into the great world of real 
social life. The social forms of physical 
training in classes or in teams require, and so 
tend to train, loyalty. 

Physical training may then be so guided as 
to be a direct training in social lovaltv. Your 
secretary has kindly put into my hands, during 
my preparation of this paper, two German 
monographs ^ whose authors insist, in some- 

* Lorenz, Wehrkraft und Jugenderziehung, Voigtlander's 
Verlag in Leipzig, 1S99; Koch, Die Erziehung zum Mute 
durch Turnen, Spiel, und Sport, BerlLn, 1900. 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

what contrasting ways, upon this directly 
important office of the teacher of physical 
training as a teacher of loyalty and upon the 
value of play, of systematic gymnastics, and of 
athletic sports, as a training school for loyal 
citizenship. Both of these monographs are 
written under the influence of the spirit of 
militarism, one of them especially so; and 
you know now why I should view militarism 
as a decidedly blind, although often very 
sincere and intense, form of loyalty, — a form 
which >^"ill vanish from the earth whenever 
men come to an enlightened sense of what 
loyalty to loyalty implies. But one has to 
use, for the best, such types of loyalty as now 
prosper amongst men; and the good side of 
militarism is indeed the devotion that goes with 
it, even as the bad side of militarism is due to 
its implied suspicion that the loyalty of the 
foreigners to their countrv's cause is somehow 
in essential opposition to our own loyalty. 
This suspicion is false. It breeds wars, and 
is essentially stupid. But loyalty is loyalty 
still, even when blind ; and I prefer blind 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

loyalty to the sort of thoughtless individualism 
which is loyal to nothing. In any case our 
two authors a,re right in insisting that loyalty 
and physical training are closely linked by 
ties which ought to be recognized by those 
who are planning and conducting the general 
system of national education. So much, then, 
for the second positive relation of physical 
education to the cause of general morality. 
Here, again, it is true that physical education 
can furnish only a portion, and a decidedly 
limited portion, of the means and motives 
whereby true loyalty is trained in the young, 
and whereby it may also be supported in older 
minds. But teachers who engage in your 
profession have a good right to insist upon 
this direct social significance of their work. 
They do well to insist also that they can and 
do train such direct loyalty, not only in the 
work of athletic teams, but in successful 
class-work of all kinds, such as the teachers 
of physical training can direct. 



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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

V 

The third positive relation of physical 
training to moral training is suggested by 
what I have said about the need of an enlight- 
ened form of loyalty. Merely blind loyalty 
may do mischief : but it does so, we have said, 
not because it is loyalty, but because it is 
blind. It turns into enlightened loyalty in 
so far as it reaches the stage of loyalty to 
loyalty, — the stage where one certainly does 
not tend merely to take over into one's own 
life and directly to adopt the special cause 
that one's neighbor has happened to choose 
as his own, but where one regards the spirit 
of loyalty, the willingness to devote the self 
to some cause, as a precious common moral 
good of mankind, — a good that we can indeed 
foster in our neighbors even when their in- 
dividual causes are not our own, or are even, 
by accident, opposed to our own. I can re- 
spect, can honor, I can help, my neighbor's 
family loyalty without in the least wishing to be- 
come a member of his family. And just so I 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

can be loyal to any aspect of my neighbor's 
loyalty without accepting his special cause 
as my own. He may be devoted to what I 
cannot and will not view as my individual 
cause; and still, in dealing with him, I can 
be loyal to his loyalty. 

Now I have already pointed out that the 
spirit of loyalty to loyalty is finely exemplified 
by the spirit of fair play in games. For true 
fair play does not merely mean conformity 
to a set of rules which chance this season to 
govern a certain game. Fair play depends 
upon essentially respecting one's opponent 
just because of his loyalty to his own side. 
It means a tendency to enjoy, to admire, 
to applaud, to love, to further that loyalty 
of his at the very moment when I keenly want 
and clearly intend to thwart his individual 
deeds, and to win this game, if I can. Now 
in the complications of real life it is hard to 
keep the spirit of loyalty to loyalty always 
alive. If my passions are aroused and if I 
hate a man, it is far too easy to think that even 
his faithful dog must be a mean cur, in order 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

to be able to be so devoted to his master as he 
is. And real life often thus confuses our 
judgment through stirring our passions. But 
it is a very precious thing when you can keep 
your head so clearly as to be able to oppose 
even to the very death, if needs must be, 
your enemy's cause, even while you are able to 
love his loyalty to that cause, and to honor 
his followers for their devotion to their leader, 
and his friends for their fidelity to him. 

Now it is just such loyalty to loyalty that 
can be trained in true sport very much more 
readily than in real life, because, in sport, 
the social situation is simple. And because 
the spirit of fair play, in an athletic sport, can 
constantly express itself by definite physical 
deeds, and because the passions aroused by 
wholesome athletic contests ought never to be 
as blind, as violent, or as enduring as those 
which real life unhappily so often fosters, the 
training in fair play ought to be much easier 
in the world of athletic sports than the training 
of loyalty to loyalty is in our daily life, — 
much easier, much simpler, and much more 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

definite. Hence, if games were in all cases 
rightly conducted, if confusing passions were 
properly kept from unnecessary interference 
with the joyous devotion of the players to their 
respective sides, if the general physical training 
of all those who are to engage in school and in 
college sports were conducted from the first 
by teachers who had a serious interest in the 
moral welfare of their classes, — well, if these 
conditions were realized, physical education 
ought to contribute its important share to 
what we have now seen to be the very crown 
of human virtue; namely, to the spirit of 
loyalty to loyalty, — to the spirit that honors 
and respects one's very enemies for their 
devotion to the very causes that one assails. 
The result should be the spiritual power to 
appreciate that common good for which even 
those who are mutually most hostile are con- 
tending. We human beings cannot agree as 
to the choice of our individual causes. We 
can learn to honor one another's loyalty. 

The spirit of fair play, as trained in such 
sports as are founded upon a systematic physi- 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

cal and moral preparation for the strains of 
contest, ought then to be made a fine prep- 
aration for the very highest and hardest 
forms of loyalty, as such loyalty is needed for 
the great world's social work. The spirit of 
fair play, as applied in the larger social life, 
has been called of late by a rather poor, if 
popularly effective name, — the now familiar 
name "the square deal." The name is poor, 
despite the intent of the distinguished moralist 
who is responsible for its recent popular usage, 
because it is a name derived from games of 
chance, and because it suggests that the 
true spirit of loyalty to loyalty is sufficiently 
shown when you merely avoid any interfer- 
ence with your opponent's agreed right to his 
share of the chances of the game. But true 
loyalty to loyalty involves a spirit that goes 
much further than this. It involves an active 
and effective positive respect, — yes, love, 
for loyalty, wherever you meet with it, even if 
the loyalty that you honor inspires those very 
deeds of the opponent which you most are 
required by your own cause to thwart. Now 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

this active and practical honor for the loyalty 
of your opponents is no mere external orna- 
ment of the chivalrous virtues. It is simply 
the very essence of all the highest virtues. 
Higher civilization depends upon it. True 
justice, which certainly involves very much 
more than "the square deal," true charity, 
truthfulness, humanity, — these are all the 
embodiments of loyalty to loyalty. And in 
real life this form of virtue is at once the most 
valuable and the hardest. 

Here, then, is an opportunity for the teacher 
engaged in physical training to set before his 
pupils the highest of human ideals in an ex- 
tremely practical way, and in close connection 
with definite physical activities. If a man is 
loyal to the loyalty that he has seen, — has 
seen expressed in the activities of the play- 
ground, the gymnasium, and the athletic field, 
— he ought to be helped toward that loyalty 
to unseen loyalty which constitutes the soul 
of rectitude in great business enterprises, the 
heart of honor in our national and interna- 
tional enterprises. 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

And yet this great opportunity, which the 
teacher of physical training possesses, is, as 
I need not say, attended by great and insidious 
dangers. Do the modern sports of our inter- 
collegiate and interscholastic teams uniformly 
tend toward the encouragement of loyalty 
to loyalty? Is not this great moral oppor- 
tunity of physical education far too much 
wasted, through the accidents and the excesses 
of our present educational system ? To ask 
this question is to remind you of numerous 
recent controversies whose grave significance 
you all know. Great opportunities do not 
necessarily mean great successes. The cor- 
ruption of the best may prove to be the worst. 

VI 

And with these words I am indeed brought 
to the central problem amongst all those with 
which this discussion is concerned. I have 
set forth the three sorts of positively helpful 
relations that a sound physical training can 
develoj) in its bearing upon the work of 
moral training. First, because skilful and 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

serious physical exercise involves true de- 
votion, a sound physical training can help to 
prepare the organism and the personality 
for loyal types of activity. Secondly, physical 
training, in so far as it is a part of the life of a 
social group, can more directly aid the individ- 
ual to learn to be loyal to his group. Thirdly, 
physical training, in so far as it can be used 
to give expression to the spirit of fair play, 
may be an aid toward the highest types of 
morality; namely, to those which embody 
that spirit of loyalty to loyalty which is des- 
tined, we hope, some day to bring to pass the 
spiritual union of all mankind. I have pointed 
out that all these three forms are simply 
possible forms in which the moral usefulness 
of physical training may appear. There is 
nothing that fatally secures the attainment of 
any of these three results. All depends upon 
the spirit, the skill, and the opportunities of the 
teacher, and upon the awakening of the right 
spirit in the learners. Instead of these good 
results, a failure to reach any of these three 
sorts of good results, in any tangible form, is 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

in case of any given pupil or class of pupils 
perfectly possible. And, as we have just seen, 
the failure of certain forms of athletic sports 
to further, in certain well-known cases, the 
high cause of loyalty to loyalty has of late 
been far too conspicuous. Can one who 
approaches this topic from the ethical side 
suggest to you any way in which you may 
hope, as a body, to do more than has yet been 
done to make physical education morally 
serviceable ? To this question I venture, as I 
close, to suggest very fragmentary answers. 

In judging of the practical ideals that people 
cherish regarding their calling and regarding 
its results, one may make use of a tentative 
method which is likely to be at least partially 
enlightening. We all of us have had, in our 
lives, what may be called our typical great 
experiences, — our moments when life reached 
for the time its highest expression, the maxima 
of our curve of existence. Poets love to talk 
about such moments; romancers dwell upon 
them in narrating their stories; our own 
memories glow when we recall our own mo- 
T 273 



PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

ments of this general type. A conversion or a 
sudden relief from great sorrow, a home- 
coming, the reunion of lovers long parted, the 
moment of hearing the first cry of some new- 
born infant, — these are familiar instances 
of w^hat may be such maxima in the curve of 
experience of this or of that human being, — 
glorious discoveries of new success or of great 
attainment. Well, our personal and our pro- 
fessional activities, our avocations and our 
vocations, our exercises and our sports, are 
characterized each by its own type of maximal 
experiences. And you can tell something 
about the moral character and the deeper 
significance either of a person or of an occupa- 
tion when you hear some typical report about 
what was, from the point of view of this 
person or of this occupation, the type of ex- 
perience which seemed, in its own place and 
setting, to have such a maximal character. 
It has occurred to me to suggest, as one way 
of estimating the moral value of those experi- 
ences which one person or another may as- 
sociate with athletic activities, an examination 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

of some of the reports that experts, who also 
happen to be authors, have given of what to 
their minds seemed to be the truly great mo- 
ments of athletic activity, — the moments when 
one most deeply experiences what, to himself 
personally, the whole business in the end 
means. Of course our daily life has to be lived, 
whatever our profession, upon a somewhat 
commonplace level. And it is upon such levels 
that, after all, we have to win many of the 
best moral results that devotion can bring into 
our lives. But just as love is for a lifetime, 
but the stories of love's triumphs centre about 
the exaltations of the moment when two souls 
first find each the other, so it is our general 
custom to conceive the moral values of every- 
day life in terms of our memory or imagination 
of the great instants of life. 

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken ; " 

says Keats; and one knows at once to what 
sort of exaltation he refers. This maximum 
of experience stands for a type of conscious- 
ness in terms of which the poet conceives all 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

the long hours and days through which he 
devoted himself to Chapman's Homer. 

Well, I have asked myself, how do expert 
athletes conceive the maximal moments of 
their lives as athletes? With what exultation 
are they filled when they contemplate their 
greatest attainments? Tell me that, and I 
can do something to comprehend their moral 
attitude toward their work, and the perils and 
the uses of this attitude. 

Of course, any one who tells, in an expert 
way, a story of athletic triumphs, will depict, 
in lively fashion, the moment of victory. And, 
of course, the exultation of victory, taken by 
itself, has somewhat uniform characters, such 
as any boys' story of sports or any lively news- 
paper picture of a great game will portray. 
I need not dwell upon the fact that victory in 
any contest is keenly joyous, and constitutes 
a maximum point in the curve of experience, 
and that whoever writes a lively sporting story 
keeps you in suspense for a time, as the specta- 
tors at the game are kept in suspense, and then 
thrills you with the elemental delight of the 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

victorious solution of the problem of contest, 
as the cheerful romancer lets the lovers agonize 
awhile, and then indeed somehow startles 
you with the perfectly familiar thrill of dis- 
covering that their hour of joy at length arrives. 
Such incidents are aesthetically attractive; 
but they are not the sorts of maximal experi- 
ences that I now have most in mind. For 
my present purpose, I want to know whether, 
as the expert recalls the moment of his highest 
athletic attainment, he thinks of anything 
besides victory, and whether this other feature, 
besides victory, w^hich at such great instants 
he has before him, and which he later recalls, 
is of the nature of a morally significant en- 
largement or fulfilment of any higher self, 
so that the memory of this maximum is indeed 
any sort of moral inspiration in later life. 

Let me quote to you at once the report of 
an expert, in which he tells of a great athletic 
experience of his own, associated, as it was, 
with no little peril. In the year 1896 Philip 
Stanley Ab))ot, a Harvard graduate of the 
class of 1890, was killed by an accident during 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

an attempted ascent of Mt. Lefroy, in the 
Selkirks. He was a man of great intellectual 
promise and power, and an experienced and 
devoted mountain climber, whose death left 
mourning a very wide circle of friends. In 
a memorial of Abbot that w^as published in 
the annual report of the Sierra Club of Cali- 
fornia, there is printed a passage from a letter 
which he once wrote to a friend about his first 
Selkirk expedition, — an expedition antedating 
by some time the final and fatal attempt to 
ascend Mt. Lefroy. The passage has the 
interest that Abbot, who was a scholar and a 
moralist, as well as a mountain expert, had 
long found in his mountain climbing a moral 
inspiration, which aided him in the hard 
work of his practical life. He was no pleasure- 
seeker and no boaster. He had chosen his 
Alpine avocation because he found in it a 
moral support that, to his mind, justified its 
peril. Was his judgment sound in this par- 
ticular.^ Well, let him tell his own tale: — 

"Palmer's old theory, that the nearest 
approach that we can make toward defining 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

the summum bonum is to call it 'fulness of 
life,' explains a great many things to me. 
Once we came out at seven o'clock upon the 
crest of a snow mountain, with two thousand 
feet of rather difficult snow work before 
us, when I had expected plain sailing, — and 
the daylight had already begun to fade. At 
the bottom of the two thousand feet we were, 
as it proved, still five miles from home ; but we 
could have camped there. But where we were 
there was nothing more level than the roof of 
a house, except the invisible bottom of an 
occasional huge crevasse, half masked and 
half revealed. I had been feeling lifeless all 
that day, and we had already had nine hours 
of work. But the memory of that next hour 
is one of the keenest and most unmixed 
pleasures I have carried away, — letting one's 
self go where the way was clear, trusting to 
heels alone, but keeping the ice-axe ready for 
the least slip, — twisting to and fro to dodge 
the crevasses, planning and carrying out at the 
same instant, — creeping across the snow- 
bridges like snails, and going down the plain 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

slopes almost by leaps, — alive to the finger- 
tips, — is a sensation one can't communicate 
by words, but you need not try to convince me 
that it isn't primary. However, this by the 
way." 

You will all recognize this, I take it, as a 
maximal experience of a type that belongs 
to what one might call the lucid athletic 
activities, wherein the highest exertion, the 
completest devotion of the self to the end in 
hand, are accompanied by the clearest sense of 
the social relation to one's fellow-workers, and 
so by the fullest self-assertion, self-expression, 
or, as Abbot calls it, by the fulness of life. 

Now are all the great sports equally charac- 
terized by such lucid self-possession at the 
maximal moments, — by such complete union 
of the active self and its object that skill, 
devotion, and success are all equally clear 
facts of consciousness just when the loftiest 
height of the experience is reached ? That 
is a technical question which I have no right 
to try to answer upon my own authority. 
But, when I turn to the ordinary sporting 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

story, I find that the highest height is said to 
be reached, in the mental life of some sports, 
just when, amidst the plaudits of vast crowds, 
in the intoxication of relief from suspense, in 
the exhaustion of the completely worked out 
organism, — when, I say, at such an instant, — 
the higher centres refuse to function definitely, 
and the victorious hero turns into an auto- 
matic physical mechanism, that somehow, 
half consciously or unconsciously, accom- 
plishes in a blind way the crowning deed of 
triumph, while a sort of aurora of glorious 
and confusedly blessed sensations flickers 
dizzily and massively in the place where the 
hero's mind had before seemed to dwell. 
In a recent sketch by Mr. Ruhl, "Left Be- 
hind," the success of the hero in a mile foot- 
race culminates in a kindly but subconscious 
automatism on the hero's part, whereby he 
turns at the moment of winning, catches in 
his arms his fainting and defeated rival as 
the latter crosses the line, and carries him, 
then, to the tent near by. What followed, 
while the hero worked to revive his prostrate 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

fellow-contestant, is thus depicted : " Outside 
the crowd cheered and howled, and pushed 
up against the canvas walls, and from the 
distance came the boom of the band, marching 
to them across the field. He [the hero work- 
ing to revive the defeated rival] swabbed on 
witch hazel desperately — panting, dizzy with 
excitement and happiness, and a queer happy- 
weepy remorse. The Other Man opened his 
eyes and blinked. 

*"Bill,' he grinned the best he could, and 
held out his hand, 'I guess we've been fools 
long enough.' Then he got tired again. 
'It was a great race,' he said, without opening 
his eyes. The hero replies, 'Yes! yes.' 
He meant," continues our author, "that he 
thought it had been long enough. Somehow 
he couldn't remember any words. And then 
the crowd came in." 

Now contrast these two maximal moments 
of athletic experience : in the one, the self 
alive to the finger-tips with devotion and 
triumph, joyously laboring side by side with 
its comrades amidst the beautiful and merci- 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

less fields of snow, and just above the half 
visible depths of the crevasses; in the other, 
the self with its " queer happy- weepy remorse," 
confused, automatic, kindly, but maudlin. 
These are, I say, two maximal experiences, 
each to be remembered for a lifetime. Each 
has its obvious physical and psychological 
conditions. Each is quite in order in its own 
context. I have, of course, no objection to 
offer to the existence of either of them, when 
it comes to the man who has earned it and 
who has his right to it. But the contrast 
suggests at once a fair question. On the 
whole, since we are prone to estimate our lives 
and our daily work so much in terms of 
such maximal experiences, let us ask then 
which forms of sport, other things being 
equal, are, on the whole, likely to be best 
adapted to the steadiest sort of moral tiain- 
ing, — those whose highest heights are 
reached in a state of "happy-weepy re- 
morse," amid howling crowds and dizzy 
confusions of consciousness, or those sports 
whose loftiest hours or moments of triumph 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

leave the self "alive to the finger-tips," not 
with mere muscular sensations, but with the 
sense of clearly conscious devotion, of self- 
possession, and of exalted, yes, genuinely 
spiritual, mastery of something that, however 
hard or perilous, seems to be worth mastering. 
All kinds of sport have, no doubt, their func- 
tions. I am, as you see, venturing to answer 
here no technical questions; nor do I doubt 
that there are maximal moments in the lives 
of all of us when we are, in Shelley's phrase, 
"dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing." Yet, on the 
whole, I can venture to say that, educationally 
considered, and especially from the point of 
view of moral education, those forms of sport 
must be best whose highest moments leave one 
as clearly in possession of himself, and of 
his loyal relations to his mates and his rivals, 
as the physical exhaustions attending these 
highest moments permit. 

Now this word about the experiences attend- 
ing sport is meant here simply to make definite 
this closing suggestion regarding the conditions 
that must aid in keeping either a set of class 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

exercises in gymnastics or a sport upon a 
high level as a means of moral education. 
What your athletic exercises need, in order 
that they may attain a high grade of moral 
eflBcacy, is a set of social conditions such as 
tend to clear-headedness rather than to con- 
fusion, such as at their highest point shall lead 
to Abbot's and Professor Palmer's fulness of 
life rather than to the iflood of "happy-weepy 
remorse" or of other enjoyable destructions 
of moral equilibrium. For loyalty means 
clear-headedness; and you all regard sound 
wits, skilful and definite activities, lucidity, 
as mental traits that are to be trained by the 
greater part of all those class exercises and all 
those sports that you yourselves most admire. 
The evils, however, of the recent school and 
college sports have resulted, so far as I can 
see, almost wholly from the unsound social 
conditions which have been allowed to sur- 
round and to attend both the intercollegiate 
and the interscholastic games. For the ethics 
of sport have come, through the recent social 
conditions, to be influenced, both directly and 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

indirectly, by the confused and unprincipled 
sentiments of great crowds of people, and, in 
general, by the intrusion of enthusiasms 
whose origin is due to the fact that too many 
people have been interfering in mass, in 
thoughtless ways, through the press, or through 
the presence of excited and cheering multitudes, 
— have been interfering with the moral educa- 
tion of our youth. Nobody can learn loyalty 
from mobs. The Harvard Stadium is an 
admirable place when it is not too full of 
people. But when it is full of people it is a 
bad place for the moral education of our 
athletic youth, just because, by the size of the 
crowds that it collects, it encourages, even in 
the most highly trained men and even in the 
most intelligent and skilful of sports, ideals 
that inevitably centre far too much about those 
poorer sorts of maximal experiences to which 
I have made reference and too little about 
that type of fulness of life which Philip 
Abbot glorified. Every athletic reform at 
Harvard must aim to minimize not so much the 
athletic as the social perils of modern sport. 

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PHYSICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA 

But you, the teachers engaged in physical 
education, are fostering the sort of athletic 
life that flourishes in small, clearly defined, 
well-organized social groups. Whether class 
work or games are made prominent in this or 
in that part of your teaching, you are all 
working to combine in your pupils skill, 
devotion, loyalty of the individual to his com- 
munity, and, whenever you have an opportu- 
nity to insist upon fair play in difficult situa- 
tions, you are teaching loyalty to loyalty. 

My purpose in this paper has been to sug- 
gest the correlation of your work with that of 
others who are engaged in moral education. 
Loyalty to the community and loyalty to 
loyalty, — and both of them expressed, not 
in confused sentiments, but through clearly 
conscious deeds, — these are the traits that 
the teacher of morals must inculcate. You 
see the task. I have suggested its dangers. 
I am sure that you, "alive to the finger- 
tips," are ready for your share of the perils 
of our great modern educational effort to find 
our way to the high places of the Spirit. 

287 



"A POWER IN THE BUSINESS OF LIVING," says the New York Tribune of 

The Philosophy of Loyalty 

By JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., LL.D. 

Professor of the History of Philosophy, Harvard University ; author of 

" Outlines of Psychology, Phe Conception of God," 

" The World and the Individual," etc. 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.^0 net; by mail, $i.6o 

"The ethical value of loyalty needed discussion, especially as so 
much so-called loyalty is mere self-delusion. To be loyal in mere 
words, or nejjatively, to the shell of an outworn convention is not to be 
loyal at all, or wise. Moreover, true loyalty must express itself practi- 
cally, in the way of a man's life, in his deeds. Cherished without rea- 
soning, and to no really practical purpose, it avails nothing. The drift 
of circumstances that may make a man of high and strong personal 
qualities a power for lasting good in a community, or develop him as a 
harmful inlluence to society, does not escape Professor Royce's attention. 
The present significance of his book, therefore, is evident. . . . The 
author disclaims the idea of making a text-book or an elaborately tech- 
nical work of philosophical research. The appeal of the book is to all 
readers." — New York Times. 

" A thoroughly sincere attempt to set clearly before the American 
people the need for aiming at the highest ethical ideals in their daily 
lil'e, in their intercourse with one another, and in their relations with 
the outside world. Believing that certain present-day conditions and 
tendencies indicate a lowering of individual and national standards, 
Professor Royce gives himself resolutely to the task of remedial and 
constructive criticism. His programme of reform is summed up in the 
single phrase — the cultivation of a spirit of loyalty. . . . His work is 
immediately and concretely inspiring to the man not at all concerned 
with the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, but very much concerned 
in the affairs of every-day existence. It helps him to appreciate the 
poverty of egotistical ideals — such as the ideal of power — and it 
plainly propounds means whereby life may be made really worth 
living." — The Outlook. 

" It gives beautiful and forceful expression to ethical idealism, and 
grandly fulfils its purpose 'to simplify men's moral issues, to clear their 
vision for the sight of the eternal, to win hearts for loyalty.' . . . There 
is moral enthusiasm in it, there is patriotism in it, there is love of hu- 
manity in it. It comes from the heart of a man, from the big heart of a 
big man, from a fine loyal soul. I'ichte never spoke with greater fer- 
vor and eloquence than does this idealist of Cambridge, and it is to be 
hoped that his words will sink deej) into the hearts of the nation." — 
Dr. Frank Thilly in The Philosophical Review. 



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"A book for every parent and thinker" 

Outlines of Psychology 

AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE WITH 
SOME PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS 

By JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., LL.D. 

Professor of the History of Philosophy in 
Harvard University 

Cloth, i2mo, jyg pages, $i.2§ net 

More and more the practice is growing of defining a good many of 
the problems of practical life in psychological terms so far as they are 
able to do so ; and to those who share this tendency, Dr. Royce's book 
will be particularly interesting. 

He presupposes a serious reader, one who really " wants to know," 
but not one trained either in experimental methods or in philosophical 
inquiries. He tries to tell such a reader a few things that seem to him 
important, about the most fundamental and general processes, laws, 
and conditions of mental life. 

" It is not a ' pedagogical psychology,' but a scientific psychology, 
written in such a way as to make readily accessible to teachers a deep 
and true knowledge of the natures which they seek to influence." — 
Western Journal of Education. 

"Obviously a treatise upon psychology that deals with the subject 
with this broad, free, strong handling is suggestive and constructive; 
helps us to organize our ideas; throws out new light; cannot be dis- 
regarded by the students of the mind. The treatise, however, has a 
special value in practical applications. These are not ' helps to the 
teacher,' they are criticisms upon life and society and are helps to the 
thinker who is a teacher." — W. E. Chancellor in the Journal of 
Pedagogy. 

"The reader of this book, who, wishing to make an elementary 
study of the inner mind of the world, takes Professor Royce for his 
guide, will find himself increasingly in serious companionship with a 
winsome as well as a knowing leader." — Chicago Tribune. 



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Social Psychology 



By EDWARD A ROSS 

Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin; 

author of "Social Control," "The Foundations 

of Sociology," " Sin and Society," etc. 



Cloth, i2mo, 2J2 pages, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.6^ 

A study of the uniformities that come into existence among men 
from social causes. Those which are due to a common physical en- 
vironment, and those which arise from race endowment, or historical 
conditions, are no part of the author's subject at present. He seeks to 
enlarge and to clear our knowledge of society by explaining how so 
many similarities of feeling, belief, or purpose, have established them- 
selves as a result of menial contacts or mental interactions. 

These general levels of uniformity among men supply a basis for 
those groupings, cooperations, and conflicts, which are the special 
study of sociology proper. As an introduction to that science this book 
is, therefore, almost indispensable. 

" One must dissent from it occasionally, but it is a wholesome, stimu- 
lating, and serviceable work." — The Outlook. 

" Professor Ross carries his reader through the fascinating problems 
of suggestibility, the crowd, the mob, fashion, conventionality, custom, 
and social progress. If one-half of his pages are filled with long cita- 
tions familiar to most readers of sociology, the repetition is always 
timely and pointed. No occasion for holding up the mirror to Ameri- 
cans is lost; anecdotes about our fads, religious and financial manias, 
society sillinesses, deep-rooted irrationalities, etc., drive home the 
author's contentions most effectively just because everybody has heard 
them a hundred times and knows them to be true. . . , He has laid 
bare the mure vital social traits, good and bad, of the human mind, 
and in a manner calculated to awaken thought." — New York Tribune. 



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Races and Immigrants in America 

By JOHN R. COMMONS 



Cloth, i2mo, $i.2§ net 



Books upon the problems of immigration which have recently ap- 
peared have been of two kinds: one descriptive and narrative, graphic 
sketches of travel abroad in the sources of the flood, or scenic portrai- 
ture of the types coming to us; the other, books of statistics, data 
from the census and discussion of the political phases of the movement. 
What characterizes Mr. John R. Commons' Races and Immigrants in 
America is that while he keeps certain elements of the other types, he 
is chiefly interested in his problem as a student of sociology. He dis- 
cusses Race philosophically. He analyzes democracy as a force bear- 
ing upon the social assimilation involved. He is not interested so 
much in the mere data of immigration in industry as he is in discover- 
ing what function industry forms in inducing immigration in the first 
place and moulding it later on. The same may be said about his care- 
ful discussion of the relation of immigration to crime and pauperism 
and politics. Just as Professor Steiner depicts the different races to us, 
so Professor Commons analyzes their traits and contributions to the 
body politic. The book is therefore not so much original in its data, 
as in the interpretation of the data. It is valuable largely because it is 
the last book, using a wide range of readings in other drier or more 
picturesque literature, and giving us, in addition to facts, his judgment 
as to their interpretation. Only a trained and versatile scholar could 
have given us what is, upon the whole, the most valuable and compen- 
dious book on this subject, up to date. The bibliography furnished is 
of especial value to the scholar. 



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.AUGUSTINE ^-^ *•••' <^° ^. *•"' \^ .. "^-i- 



